Soullessness
by SilentProtagonist000
Summary: COMPLETE. Childhood friends Dawn and Lucas have attempted to infiltrate Team Galactic's base; but alas, they have failed and are being kept as prisoners. Team Galactic's leader, Cyrus, finds Dawn to be an interesting plaything, but even emotionless men cannot stop love. Akatsukishipping and Fortuneshipping. Rated for rape and sexual themes.
1. Prologue

Dawn could only sit still and wait.

Being an impatient girl by nature, she was not one that was particularly inclined to wait for anything, but she knew that her persistence would be well rewarded this time. Lacing her fingers together, she tapped her thumbs aimlessly against the sides of her hands. Vaguely, she noticed the sleeves of her pink coat falling over her thin wrists, so she had to unclasp her hands and raise them up in the air so they could slide back down to the crooks of her elbows. It was pressed and starched clean—the way Cyrus always made sure her clothes were.

While she fidgeted, she thought of everything that had brought her to this imminent moment. How stupid she and Lucas had been—stupid indeed, to think that they could bring down an entire criminal organization with resilience and brawn alone. She truly realized what children they were together—and that was unusual, for when they were alone, they separately managed to find the maturity that helped them endure trials and tries of their courage. Sixteen and continually foolish, even at a time in their lives where teenagers didn't think they were inane after a certain age. She wanted to assert that she wasn't a child anymore, but putting themselves in mutual danger was indeed naïve, exactly how a child would react to a situation like Team Galactic.

Or perhaps she didn't want to imply that—after everything that happened, she wished she were a little girl again. It was so easy for one's innocence to be stripped from them violently and without remorse, and purity, once lost, could not be regained. When she had infiltrated Team Galactic's base with Lucas that afternoon four months ago, she ihad/i been a child, oblivious to the world's struggles and the hunger of man. And she still was, even as the Team kept her and Lucas prisoner and watched them deteriorate—and both in brutally different ways.

They starved Lucas; they allowed him to waste away into nothingness with only a minimal amount of food, without the opportunity to shower or wear clothes other than the rotting rags that he raged in Team Galactic's base with so long ago. He frolicked amongst the other prisoners, plotting and hatching ideas for escape—ideas that never came to fruition. Ratatta nibbled at his scraps and harassed him in his empty but just sleep. To Dawn, Lucas got the long end of the stick.

Dawn was fed. Dawn was clothed. Dawn slept in her own room, with tidy sheets and white walls like the Team Galactic grunts. But that pampering came with a price.

She was tortured in a very special way.

But when had that torture morphed into chore? And when had that chore become a pleasure? When did the dread that sank with the heaviness of a peach pit in her stomach turn to indifference, and when did her uncaring exterior blossom into love? When did Cyrus's bitter, heavy hands soften, and soon caress her with concern and gentle hesitation? The days here had bled into weeks and into months, and she knew not when any of this happened exactly. She merely knew that they did.

And now, she waited. She waited like a good girl, waited for her judgment to be imposed upon her.

Lucas loved her. He had always been in love with her, even when both of them were too young to know what constituted love. They had grown up together in the trees of Twinleaf Town, eagerly waiting at each other's doorsteps so they could run outside and climb the rowan trees that donated their name to the famed Pokemon Professor that lived in there. Lucas had given her homemade present every time Dawn had a birthday or the town openly celebrated Christmastime. Pinecones glued together with sloppy ribbons garnishing the top spears, leaves that had died and crumpled to the earth stuck to a piece of beige construction paper, and twigs bound together and sharpened to a fine point—a "sword," as Lucas had called it eons ago. (Dawn still had that somewhere back home in Twinleaf, she was certain.) And it became customary for Lucas to peck her on the cheek and blush, giving her holiday or celebratory greetings in a shy, drawn voice. Dawn knew that Lucas had always wished to be more to her than a friend, but Dawn could never bring herself to be a slave to such emotions as Lucas. Especially now, trapped in this place of warped logic and empty domain with nothing more but their wits to keep them alive.

But iCyrus./i

He was the coldest man Dawn had ever met—and perhaps the darkest heart to ever walk on the planet. He was so pitiless that Dawn was almost convinced that he did not have a soul; Cyrus, she believed, was encapsulated in a state of soullessness. With an unfaltering, steely gaze, Cyrus watched with extremely muted pleasure as the existence of Pokemon and humanity as species went extinct and their world yielded around them. Cyrus never smiled, nor did his general expression of bitter indifference ever change. The whole time Dawn had known him, he had never addressed her by name, only with indirect connotations and bland pronouns. To Dawn, he was cloistered, refusing to open himself up to anybody—not his Commanders, not his Pokemon, and certainly not her.

Yet Dawn iknew/i Cyrus, because she understood through him that even the most emotionless souls can show flickers of mercy. It had taken him months to warm up to her, but when he did, Dawn noticed things. She had seen even the slightest tenderness in his eyes when he touched her; she had felt his body slacken if she tried to tentatively embrace him and curl into hers, as if delighted by the contact. When he looked at her, even in the presence of his Commanders, she saw a grain of something very soft and delicate reflect in distant powder blue eyes. Dawn was thankful that his Commanders were not perceptive and couldn't pick up on such a miniscule shift in Cyrus's expression, for she knew only Cyrus communicated with her so surreptitiously.

Inversely, Lucas was jovial and optimistic, and Dawn herself was not much more pragmatic from the years they spent growing up in each other's presence. Many believed that she and Lucas would get together someday, once Dawn stopped with her eternal cold feet toward her childhood friend. Dawn and Lucas, the future couple, were always the amused talk of Twinleaf. Even their parents got along famously, laughing at the playful notoriety their children had gained.

But it was not Lucas who had been her first. Lucas knew Dawn's personality like his own, but it was Cyrus that knew her body. He was aware of her soft spots and where she was weakest, where she was sensitive and what elicited responses from her. Team Galactic was the fear of Sinnoh, and Cyrus was a man who was hated barely less than Giovanni of Team Rocket in Kanto and Johto. She saw his mug spread across the news like butter and stories of his exploits, followed by rewards offered if anyone could give insight to Team Galactic's heinous plans. If Dawn had been told four months ago that she would be in this position now, she would have ignored the thoughtless suggestion. Stupid whores for attention and gold-digging widows were the main source of sexual amusement for leaders of criminal organizations, after all.

Dawn was neither, and she was still mistress to a despised monster.

And what frightened her was that she iliked/i it.


	2. Part 1

**Four months ago.**

_Cyrus found it silly, really, that two children had the audacity to break into his base like this. Who did they think they were, G-men? Foolhardy, clumsy police officers? The heroes in those frivolous fairy tales he was told as a child, out to "save the world?" Their brazenness was ridiculous. If Cyrus cared even a speck for their failed attempt to overthrow his mighty organization, he would have laughed. But he hadn't laughed for twenty years, so why should he laugh now—and over something so incredibly thick that a laugh would not have even been warranted, much less worth one? Cyrus merely and offhandedly wrote off their daftness as teenage density performed with adult-like consequences. They were young, but they had committed a wrong against him, and they would suffer for it._

_Why, in Arceus's name, did they desire to save a world that thrived on ugliness and stupidity? This human world had no endearing qualities; nothing that Cyrus felt made it worth living upon. In fact, it baffled him as to why any person or Pokemon so loved this planet Earth enough to stand in the way of the logic and reason of Team Galactic. His team, after all, only desired to replace this imperfect earth with a more stable and intellectual one by eliminating the ignorance and brashness that so suffocated its atmosphere. What, he asked, was there to save? And if there really was something to save in the eyes of this Earth's inhabitants, why would they send two children to do their deed? He understood now why N and Team Plasma so despised the human beings as a race and wished to eradicate them—the vast majority of the species was dull-witted and too quick to react, rather than calculate their moves. Cyrus shunned being called one. _

_But, even in his emotionless and aloof spirit, he did find these children… interesting. The boy and girl—perhaps no older than sixteen, a reprehensible age Cyrus remembers well—wielded skilled command of their Pokemon, controlling them with fluid orders and counterattacking his grunts with ease and comfort. Of course, their assault was poorly planned as they were outnumbered, and they did not know the layout of the Team Galactic base, which ultimately led to their downfall and capture. The pair worked together as an oiled team, using each other's Pokemon in rotations of offense and defense. Their strategy of battle was indeed clever, Cyrus had to give them that—but they were still merely children and were too young to fully develop their aplomb in battle. Cyrus knew that even if they had managed to reach him, he would have crushed them easily. _

_The boy was short for his age, but powerful—he had worn a jacket inside the base, but had discarded it later on in favor of lighter weight, and muscles bulged and shuddered on his biceps. A thick beret, suited for winter conditions, covered a light head of scraggy, sandy brown hair, matted from sweat and reeking with the common odor of determination and fear. Upon apprehension, he grew agitated and lashed out at Cyrus's grunts as they held him, sharp kicks and wild biting flying from him in a rage. Cyrus did not know the boy's name—he had refused to talk to his enemy. For that, Cyrus had to admit some level of respect. _

_The raven-haired girl, on the other hand, maintained eye contact with the Galactic leader and calmly answered his questions. Her mellifluous, supple voice did not quaver in trepidation, and neither did her dark vision stray from his. Though her hands quivered—the embrace across her chest where she held a wide-eyed and skittish Piplup in her arms—the girl was quite adroit at hiding her terror of Team Galactic. Her name was Dawn, she said, and she understood that her and her partner had been thwarted and that they were to be taken as prisoners. However, she did try to bargain with Cyrus for their lives—but Cyrus assured her that such action was not necessary. They would be kept alive. Not released, but kept alive. He had no use for the boy—thus, as they were carried away, Cyrus noiselessly beckoned for his sole right hand Commander, Saturn, to send the boy to the underground prison where other insurgent outsiders and rebel Team Galactic members were locked away. The prisoners would enjoy a source of fresh amusement. It would keep them quiet, occupy them from speaking of insurgence. _

_"Does the girl go with him?" Saturn asked. _

_Cyrus stared at the retreating back of the female radical, her long hair sashaying against her torn and bloodied pink overcoat. The side of his mouth twitched downward in displeasure. She was a compliant, obedient young woman—but she would have to be punished as well. He could not favor one over the other._

_Still, there was something about the girl that intrigued him. Bothered him. She was not like the rest of the idiots that were impudent enough to think that they could overpower Team Galactic with resolve alone—when those fools were captured, the strength of their so-called will disintegrated as they wept and begged for their lives or fought with the panic of caged animals, as the boy had. When the girl was met with defeat, she did not relent and observed her loss with grace. _

_It was almost as if she did not expect to win. _

_That uncharacteristic humbleness in girls her age disarmed Cyrus. Why did she act this way? What influenced her? How were she and the boy related? Cyrus had thousands of questions. He was curious. Curiosity, to him, was not an emotion and simply a human response to something he did not understand. Being curious brought about the desire for discovery—and discovery yielded knowledge._

_He welcomed curiosity. And his curiosity was piqued._

_"Keep her up here," he told Saturn. "I have plans for her."_


	3. Part 2

Four months ago—to this very day—Dawn awoke in a room that was not hers. Upon opening her innocent, coal-black eyes, she stared up at the white ceiling that glared back upon her as a blank slate, compelling her to repent her sins of the night before. The bedsheets that surrounded her aching body were tight and icy, as if they had not been laid in before. Silently, Dawn regained her strength and sat up to assess her environment.

At first, she recognized that the place was a jail cell, but realized almost immediately after the passing thought that this room was far too plush to be an object of captivity. Of course, "plush" was an exaggerated word to describe a room of such featurelessness—Dawn's room had only the twin bed with the uncomfortable mattress that she was sitting in and a dresser vanity in the corner. A mirror hung above it, blindingly reflecting the white décor of this enclave—white walls, white floor, white ceiling, white everything. And it was impeccably clean. There was not a hair out of place.

Dawn's initial reaction was panic. _Where am I?_ She thought, alarm ringing obnoxious bells in her head. _Where did they take me? What are they going to do with me? What do they have in mind? How do I get out?_ The soft expression of Lucas passed by momentarily in her visage. _Where is Lucas? Is he in a place like this, too?_ Then on, Dawn was preoccupied with her friend's safety. He was the person that had stuck by her through thick and thin, and this was indeed a time of thin ice. Of course, Dawn knew not where she was—but she did know that Lucas was not with her.

"Lucas," she croaked, sliding out of bed and crumpling onto the floor before shakily recovering her footing. "I have to find Lucas." In a daze, Dawn walked toward the door at the end of her tiny room, briefly passing the mirror on her way. She stopped to evaluate her appearance. It was not pretty—her black hair was tangled and knotted from greasy sweat. Bruised bags hung beneath her eyes from exhaustion, and her pink coat and skirt were torn and streaked with dirt and blood. She stood quivering in her boots as the chill of the room encompassed her fully, bitter that her hat and scarf had gone missing in the fight.

Turning away, she decided to ignore her looks for the moment. If she was Team Galactic's prisoner now, it was doubtful that she'd be able to care for them anyway. Finding Lucas was much more important. She needed to reunite with her partner at all costs. _We have to get out of here._

To Dawn's surprise, the door was automatic and sensed her approach, opening for her. Stepping through, Dawn's jaw dropped in shock. She was on the bottom floor of a five-story and very open interior courtyard, where there were hundreds of white doors exactly like her own. Team Galactic grunts, dressed in their full and extremely strange attire, walked in pairs, chatting amicably or having quiet arguments about this and that. A few entered similar rooms on all five floors or stopped to wait outside one for friends. If Dawn did not know better, she would describe the place as having the guise of a hotel.

_I'm being kept in the grunts' quarters!_

It was now that Dawn noticed the pair of Galactic grunts posted on either side of her door, and her door only. Whirling around, Dawn locked her eyes to the one on her left and lashed out at him. "You can't turn me into one of you!" She screeched, clawing viciously at her captor. Leaping back, the grunt whipped out a gun and pointed it at Dawn. The other looped his arms into hers, picking her effortlessly off the ground, leaving her hovering in midair while she kicked and spat. Even at sixteen, Dawn was very short. That left an advantage to her much taller foes.

Suddenly, a deeply commandeering but feminine voice boomed. "Set her down, grunt!"

Dawn jumped slightly in the grunt's rough embrace, but she felt herself placed back on solid flooring. Just as she was about to make a sightless and possibly stupid run for it, a shadow stepped before her. The shadow belonged to a woman—a hulking woman that towered far above Dawn. She boasted the defined curves of a fully developed female form, swinging large hips and a slender waist in a tight black-and-white jumpsuit that stretched almost too firmly around her swelling bust. With pointed, almond-colored eyes, she studied Dawn, pressing her plump, crimson lips together in a notion that Dawn took as disappointment. Her hair was purple, which Dawn found unusual. Colorful earrings shaped in a circular form, like a planet, dangled from her smooth earlobes, jangling as she shook her head.

"Hm," she said pensively. "How odd. I was off-duty and catching up on sleep last night, so I wasn't around for the… party." She gazed at Dawn again in boredom. "You're the girl I've been hearing so much about? You're so… dull. From the way Cyrus described you, I would have taken you to be something much more special."

_Cyrus._ "The old man with the gray hair that talked to me last night?" Dawn inquired.

The woman glared at her. "Cyrus is not old, you insensitive little snot," she hissed. "He's twenty-seven."

_Only twenty-seven? But he looked elderly,_ Dawn thought. "Where am I?" She demanded, moving on from the subject. "And where is Lucas?"

Snorting, the woman scoffed at her. "You must be very dense to not know where you are," she said. "You are in Team Galactic's base. The same one you tried to destroy last night. You are being quartered here, with the grunts. And I don't know where your friend is, so don't ask me such stupid things."

"But why am I here?" Dawn snapped. "I thought you had no use for prisoners."

"Apparently we do," the woman replied. "I had your same opinion, but Cyrus instructed that you be kept with the grunts. He clearly has something in mind for you. If it were me, I'd banish you, but I don't make the final decisions around here."

Dawn was confused. What did they want with her? "Do you have any idea what that might be?" She probed.

The woman rolled her eyes and sighed exhaustively. "Tch, you are too nosy," she huffed. Leaning forward, she sniffed before wrinkling her nose. "Arceus, you smell like a Skuntank," she observed. "Come with me. I'll lead you to the showers." She turned around and, without even looking behind her shoulder, she asked, "What is your name, girl?"

"Dawn."

"I see, Dawn," the woman said. "You may call me Jupiter. I've been assigned to care for you. Direct any of your… frivolous questions at me." She paused. "But ask one too many and I might have to snap your neck. Now come on." Jupiter began to march away stiffly.

The cold reached Dawn much faster this time.

)))(((

Through winding corridors and twisted rooms with identical appearance—an architectural quirk that Dawn knew was built to disorient intruders, as it had with her and Lucas the night before—Jupiter took her prisoner to a women's communal bathroom. It too was assembled with white blocks and coated with a glossy tile floor, wooden benches bolted to the terrazzo. They sat before a long row of metal lockers, each with miniscule and unreadable scribbling written on small slips of paper that were taped beside the locks, indicating separate areas for individual Team Galactic grunts. Instantly, Dawn recognized this place as a duplicate of a typical high school gym locker room, complete with the decrepit sinks that leaked browning water in puddles and the ten-door toilet stalls in the corner. This brought back memories of her own unpleasant experiences bathing in a crowded high school locker room, but she brushed them off, not wanting any poignant reminder of the world outside Team Galactic's walls.

There wasn't a team member in sight, Dawn noticed, which she found interesting. "Where is everyone?" She asked.

"Most of our soldiers have duties during the day," Jupiter explained, "whether or not they are patrolling or standing sentry. Our night watchmen and women are few. You are alone." She nodded to the girl. "Strip."

Dawn stared at her, aghast. "In front of you?"

Jupiter rolled her eyes. "Yes, in front of you," she snapped, irritated at Dawn's modesty. "I'm a woman. I won't do anything indecent. And your clothes are filthy. Don't you want them laundered?"

Glancing down at the shabby state of her attire, Dawn silently understood. "Okay," she finally agreed. Unbuttoning the snaps of her creamy pink coat, she shed the outer later before removing her shirt and skirt, folding them carefully and placing them in Jupiter's outstretched arms. Though she hesitated, Dawn quickly took off her bra and underwear, placing them on top of the pile of her soiled outfit—the only covering she had in this enemy base. Naked and shivering, Dawn wrapped her arms around her minute breasts and hugged herself to conserve warmth.

"I'll make sure these are cleaned," Jupiter said cryptically, seemingly bored by Dawn's misery. "There are towels, soap, and shampoo in the shower room. The laundry gets done rapidly here, so your clothes should be dry by the time you finish washing. We certainly wouldn't want you to look slovenly when you meet with Cyrus."

Dawn cocked her head in perplexity—_Meet with him about what, exactly?—_but Jupiter was already on her way out through the egress.

Turning around, Dawn hustled into the shower room next door. It was indeed public, as every shower head jutted from the ceiling in measured intervals with no separation for privacy, except a few feet of space between each one. Dawn counted herself lucky that no one else was here—the Team Galactic grunts, albeit being female in this area, would have pecked her to pieces like a flock of Murkrow with a Raticate carcass. Dashing to a group of storage cubbies on the back wall, Dawn retrieved a bottle of generic shampoo and a bar of soap before selecting a random shower, desperate to get beneath the warm spray.

She showered quietly, drowning herself in thought as she scrubbed away the layer of invisible grime that encrusted her petite frame. She pined for Lucas—every moment that passed without him, Dawn felt pathetically less and less able to go on. They had been together for years with just mere degrees of parting once in a rare while. Truthfully, Lucas was her right hand. When she was devoid of him, she couldn't bear standing on her own two feet without his side pressed against her. The jokes around Twinleaf Town about the pair being "spouses" was almost correct in the fact that they had been together so long that they were utterly comfortable about everything; their friendship was stronger that time, for it seemed to have lasted beyond it.

But her rumination about Lucas was disrupted once in a while by fleeting glimpses of this Cyrus man, obscured by the former evening's shadows—and mostly, why he was keeping her here with his grunts. Where were the other prisoners, if they were even still alive? When would she get to speak to him face-to-face and get real answers instead of vague dodging, like Jupiter was doing? And her biggest one was: Why?

She was being driven mad by her forced ignorance.

When she was done showering, Dawn turned off the faucet and fetched a towel from the cubbies. She rubbed herself down, pleased with how her skin shone and how the grittiness beneath her arms had disappeared. Dawn wrapped the towel around her body and jogged back into the main locker room, where Jupiter stood beside a bench that held the familiar mound of Dawn's clothing, tidy and pressed, all traces of smut gone.

"Get dressed," Jupiter said. "I've had you out of your room far too long. You need to get back."

Dawn heeded her orders and removed the towel in a flash, discarding it in a hamper beside the toilet stalls. After she donned her clean clothes (and basked in the fluffy feel), Dawn went in a stall to use the restroom and wash her hands. "When do I get to meet Cyrus?" She asked Jupiter once she was finished.

Jupiter snorted. "Don't you ever speak sentences that require answers?" She laughed cynically. "Soon, child. Soon."

For some reason, Dawn had a creeping feeling that "soon" was not an accurate estimate.


	4. Part 3

**Hey, you stragglers! Drop a review! Don't be shy. Silent-Protagy doesn't bite most of the time. I'd like to know how I'm doing. Thanks for your support! :D**

()()()

_The seashore of Sinnoh was always Dawn's favorite place to go, so that's how Lucas sees her—swimsuit-clad and running barefoot in the hot sand, laughing with the widest, most amicable grin he's ever seen on a person. Piplup is scrambling after her as fast as it can on its webbed toes, cheeping and flailing its infant fins as its owner slows for it to catch up. She turns around to pick Piplup from the ground and hug the perky Pokemon to her, cooing praises of complimentary love to her companion. Lucas watches her as she stares out beyond the stunning, moist beach and out to the ocean where the sun is setting on the horizon, the luminous rays skirting the surface with a maroon tinge. He knows she's thinking about all the wild Pokemon in the sea, from the Tentacool that float menacingly on the surf to the Wailord living fathoms deep that swim with their babies. As she ponders, the tide licks her toes affectionately, sifting the sand from her feet, leaving them clean as it retreats back into the waves._

_Suddenly, she blinks as reality blankets her again—and then she notices that Lucas is studying her from afar. Turning around, her smile returns, crinkling the edges of her pert nose. Her dimples reach the apexes of her large, dark eyes as she calls out to him_.

"Lucas! Lucas!"

_She's putting Piplup down and heading his way, the beads that adorn the strings of her bikini bottom whispering loudly in the breeze behind her. Her face is so lovely, from the lines of her succulent crimson lips to the shoulder-length black hair that she has tied in pigtails. As she approaches, Lucas's heart swells with love. She's here with him now—Team Galactic was nothing but a dream; they weren't captured. They were here the whole time._

_Together._

_Like they are supposed to be._

_But then Dawn's countenance begins to blur, and Piplup's chirruping cries with the distortion of crooked melodies played in an ancient music box—and Lucas understands then that it was this that was the dream, that they indeed have failed. Dawn's smile soaks into smudges, and soon dissipating to darkness entirely. The breath escapes from Lucas. Why? Why was he denied her face? He had been injudicious, putting the girl he loves so powerfully and irrevocably in danger, but why must this be his punishment?_

_He needed her to survive. Dawn was his oxygen. He would suffocate without her._

_His voice is thin and tired when he tries to speak. "Dawn, I love you." He has told her this a hundred times, but she does not seem to listen. Maybe, somewhere, she can hear him—somewhere outside the dream that he cannot escape. Over the sound of his anguish, perhaps she can hear him. Maybe she will answer. Finally, maybe, she might._

_But the only words he hears are the jumbled ones spoken by the hush of the fading sea_.

()()()

This place smells.

_Lucas thought this within seconds of waking up in his prison cell. Releasing his last breath of fresh air, Lucas inhaled the putrid atmosphere, knowing that the only way to tolerate the stink was to permeate himself with it. His gray pupils darted around to the prison in which he was now being kept, staring at the putrefying metal bars that led to a concrete corridor outside and studying the four bunk beds that were strapped with rotting chains in pairs to either wall. A gristly strand of unwashed blond hair hung off the mattress of the bottom bunk to his right, but the owner's face was obscured to him. Loud snores radiated from that bed and echoed off the cedar block walls that surrounded Lucas, streaked with piss and dried human excrement. There might have been blood mixed in as well, but Lucas couldn't tell from his vantage point._

_He was sitting upright on the floor in this very traditional prison cell, beside a wooden plank that swung on its rusting hinges, leading to a small back room that Lucas presumed was a bathroom. (He really had to go, but he was almost too afraid to see what revolting state the toilet and sink were in.) With a quick personal appraisal, Lucas noticed that he was still wearing his clothes from his and Dawn's attempt on Team Galactic—and he was completely sure that this was their prison sector. All his Pokemon were gone, but he wasn't too worried about them. He knew they were quite competent at taking care of themselves. Glancing down, he saw that his hands were bound in front of him with tight rope, tied in a Boy Scout's knot. Who the hell remembered how to do that?_

_A throbbing persisted at the back of his head, and Lucas knew he had been hit there or bumped his skull accidentally. He wanted to touch it, but his hands were occupied at the moment. Lucas expelled a breath to deaden the pain and began to glance around calmly, trying to find some way he could rub the rope raw and cut through the fibers, but a disembodied hand descended upon his shoulder before he could make a move to get up._

_"You're finally awake," someone said. "You need some help with that?" The voice in his ear tickled his skin as foreign hairs—presumably from a mustache—danced around the entrance to his eardrums._

_Jumping in surprise, Lucas scooted away from his assailant and whipped his head around to see who was getting too close for comfort. The hand belonged to a large, potbellied man of about forty years, whose stringy brown hair was balding and encircled the bare patch of skin atop his head like a monk's ring. Just as Lucas suspected, he sported poorly groomed but elegantly drooping facial hair on his upper lip, dipping so deeply that it nearly touched the straps of his grease-stained white undershirt. He was fat everywhere—even around his watery blue eyes, the barrenness of which scared Lucas to death. Lucas had heard about men in prison—stories of big criminals making the scrawnier, wimpier "boys" their… sexual companions. Lucas felt his stomach turn in horror. There was no doubt that Lucas perfectly constituted one of those "boys."_

_The man must have seen the terror in Lucas's eyes, because he started to laugh at the boy's apprehension. "Easy there, Jolteon," he chuckled. "I don't swing that way. Not even in jail. I'm just here to help you. Come on over here and I'll untie your hands."_

_Amazingly, despite the situation, Lucas found the gall within him to speak to his roommate. "How do I know that I can trust you?"_

_"You can't," the man said frankly. "But this is captivity. We're nothing but animals. You trust who you can and suspect those you don't."_

_Lucas, fazed from his many hours of sleep, scrutinized the man. Physically, he was ugly and intimidating, but he spoke with softness and gentle warmth. His prison philosophy was ambiguous and somewhat broad, but Lucas felt slightly placated by it. He glanced down at his hands again; they were beginning to turn purple from the cutting of blood flow from his wrists on._

_"Are you sure you aren't going to rape me?" Lucas asked._

_"I'm pretty damn sure, kiddo," the man said._

_Sighing, Lucas knew that he would lose his hands if he chose not to have faith in this man. Besides, he wanted to get up off this sticky, disgusting floor and into a bed—which probably wasn't much better, with its springs jotting out at every imaginable direction, but it was certainly better than this. Slinking over to the man, Lucas cautiously held out his tied wrists out to him._

_With swift haste, the man skillfully untied Lucas's hands, the rope coiling by his knees like a twined Arbok. Lucas rubbed his wrists and looked at the man gratefully. "Thank you," he said, still wary but indebted to this fellow prisoner's kindness. Gingerly, Lucas reached back to touch the pulsating lump on his scalp. "Ow."_

_"You got quite the goose egg back there," the man observed. "Just lay on your side tonight and it'll heal eventually. I wanna know how your beret stayed on through all that. It's probably better that it did. We don't get clean clothes down here. You're stuck with the ones you came in."_

_Lucas saw that the scraps of cloth dressing the man's lumbering frame suspended in tatters; his outer layers, at least, for his undershirt and shorts seemed fine. But his jacket—judging from the leftover material, it was probably once a white cotton polo shirt, but now could barely be used as tissue paper. Nevertheless, it was rather immaculate. "How are you keeping so clean?" Lucas asked._

_"We shower once a week down here," the man told him, "and I wash my clothes while I'm there. I have to go naked for a few hours, but nobody seems to care. On the plus side, I've been around here long enough that everyone knows not to harass me." He lovingly rubbed his Buddha-esque belly. "And I'm so chunky that nobody wants to, anyway."_

_"How long have you been here?" Lucas asked in disbelief._

_"One year, kiddo," the man said. "Team Galactic picked me up in Olivine City while I was messing around in the port shops, and I haven't even heard a word uttered about home since. I was a sailor, y'see. Apparently, they thought I was flirting with one of their Commanders while on leave, but it was a case of mistaken identity. I ain't never seen any of them in my entire lives and I said so during an interrogation, but they locked me up anyway. Took my Pokemon and threw away the goddamned key."_

_"A whole year?" Lucas felt ill. And that was a mild case—the crime he'd committed was much worse. What if he was stuck here for that duration—or even longer? Why would he want to keep on living? Dawn's image materialized in his thoughts, and he pushed away all dreams of suicide. He had to keep living. For her. It was crucial. It was clear that she was not in this malodorous hole with him; he could only hope that she was safe._

_"Yep," the man relented, ignoring Lucas's daze as he daydreamed. "They let you out after a few months if you have good behavior, but I can't be obedient if my life depends on it. I guess I'll finally be emancipated from this place when my soul decides to burn in hell and leave my corpse behind to rot."_

_Lucas frowned with sympathy. "I'm so sorry," he said._

_"Don't ever feel sorry for anyone in prison, kid," the man instructed. "It brings you down to an undesirable level if you commiserate with them. Only think about yourself." He grinned at Lucas, disporting a mouth of yellowing teeth with black holes from decay. "You gotta name?"_

_"Lucas."_

_"And that was your first mistake," the man volleyed. "You never, ever tell anyone your real name here. Team Galactic's got it on file, but no one down here should know your true identity. You need a pseudonym." He leaned in closely to Lucas, exorcising his ripe, scorching breath on the boy's face. "You got grey eyes. Hard, tough grey eyes. Damn. You have a feral spirit, don't you?"_

_Biting his lip, Lucas wasn't sure how to respond, so his roommate finished his own thought. "Yeah, you do," he said. "I can discern your stoutness well. It reflects proudly in your diamond eyes." He smiled. "Diamond. That's your new name, kid. Learn to wear it like your heart on your sleeve."_

_Being a sixteen-year-old, Lucas found something to complain about. "That's a feminine name, isn't it?" He observed._

_"That's a common misconception about diamonds," the man explained, "that they're a lady thing. Not true. Diamonds are one of the hardest stones in the world. Almost nothing can shatter them. They might look shiny and appealing as jewelry, but diamonds are used on the ends of drill bits. They are virtually indestructible. In my eyes, diamonds are the most masculine object in the natural world. And you, my friend, look unbreakable yourself."_

_Opening his mouth to say something, Lucas closed it again immediately, realizing with a blow of epiphany that this man was right. He'd never thought of diamonds that way before. Suddenly, his dour mood was uplifted. He felt stronger now. "What's your… er, name?"_

_"Name's Huey," he said. "I took that on after I came here 'cause I worked with a bunch of guys on the ships who had that name. It's an ordinary name for sailors. I even gave my old Krabby that moniker." Jabbing his finger toward the limp piece of hair hanging off the bottom bunk that Lucas had seen before like Spanish moss, Huey continued. "That other guy is Rob. We call him that because he stole some gadgets from Team Galactic when he was broke so he could sell them to unsuspecting little kids for pocket change. He was a Flying-type trainer once. According to prison legend, he was decent, too."_

_"Is he asleep?" Lucas asked._

_"Yes," Huey said. "He was a spruced bastard when he came here last March, but he let himself go about six months ago. Now he looks like a hippie prick. Ten moons in this place can break a man's character if he isn't smart enough." He nodded at Lucas. "You look like you might have a chance, Diamond. Pump a little iron, and you can hold your own."_

_"Do you know what time it is?" Lucas asked._

_Huey smiled. "Good thing that you asked." He reached into the holey pocket of his denim jeans—a wise choice for prisoner attire, Lucas decided, for they seemed to be in excellent shape. Huey took out a bronze pocketwatch—somewhat tarnished, but still impeccably polished. Flipping open the cap, Huey squinted in the dim lighting that was provided by a single gull lightbulb above their heads. "I got this from an old friend who passed away before I got thrown in here. I hide it in my mouth during every inspection so they never find it. One o'clock in the morning." Huey closed the watch and put it away._

_Lucas yawned. "Is it safe to sleep?" He asked Huey._

_"Go for it," Huey advised. "You'll need all the rest you can get here. I'll keep watch for ya. And don't fret about Rob; he won't do anything creepy. He's a pussy. The only living thing he can coerce is the occasional Pidgey." He nodded toward the right bed on top above Rob. "That pad is mine, but the other two across the way are open. Take your pick."_

_Standing up on his rubbery legs, Lucas trudged over to the bunk ladder to the left, directly opposite from the two taken divans. Climbing up the corroded rungs, he pulled his heavy body onto the mattress. Indeed, as he had assumed, the metal springs jabbed at his covered skin, but he was too tired to care. Turning over on his left side to face the wall, Lucas laid his head down on the pillowless textile plane. He closed his eyes, already beginning to feel himself slip away from consciousness._

_"Sleep well, Diamond." Huey's voice was remote._

_When Lucas opened his eyes again, he was on the Sinnoh seashore once more, watching Dawn run with Piplup and wave at him, beckoning him over. This time, Lucas found that he was able to move, so he walked toward her, holding out his hand with the fondness he knew would now only visit him in these dreams._

_He missed her._

_He needed her._

Oh, come back to me.


	5. Part 4

**RickyGott: Thanks so much for your feedback! Your awesomeness is greatly appreciated. Thank you to all who are reading this fanfiction. I know Team Galactic flicks aren't common anymore (they weren't even common in the first place), but I promise that I will work to the best of my ability to make this story well worth your time. Don't forget to drop a review! :D**

**~ Silent-Protagonist**

()()()

"Soon" was ten days.

Ten excruciating days of monotonous tedium that Dawn spent sequestered in her Team Galactic grunt room. There was a clock in her room, thankfully, so at least Dawn knew what time of day (or night; it was difficult to tell indoors in a place with no windows) it was and could successfully track the rising and setting of the sun. So, at any rate, she knew how many days had passed. Still, it was a wall clock—and when you have nothing but a wall clock, the only thing to do is sit and stare at the seconds' hand as it ticked repetitively, counting each subsequent click until it reached sixty and brought on a new minute. That was perhaps the most mind-numbing task that Dawn could conceive to divert herself other than sleeping, so she did that quite a bit.

Dawn rarely had any human contact other than the three times per day that Jupiter delivered her meals. Because of this, she felt very lonesome and calculated the six hours between each meal—from six in the morning to noon to six in the evening—just so she could wait for her caretaker to come back. Granted, Jupiter was a brisk and apathetic woman, but Dawn appreciated her visits—even though they were routine. As a prisoner, Dawn was naturally not allowed to go anywhere on her own. Even going to the bathroom was an adventure—at this point, Dawn knew the way to the locker room quite well, but she was still obligated to take the guards with her to ensure that she would not escape. Dawn found that to be ridiculous. Yes, she knew how to get to the locker room, but that was it. The rest of the Team Galactic base was a veritable maze. If she ran away, they would catch her again within an hour.

Once in a while, Dawn could request simple items from the guards, such as a paperback book or the occasional apple, but Dawn enjoyed busying herself with drawing. She had asked for pencils and paper two days after hers and Lucas's attempt and found the activity to be much more exciting than participating in an eternal staring contest with the clock. Dawn was a terrible artist, but her amateurish pictures of Pokemon and portraits of people living in Twinleaf Town delighted her to no end.

Drawing also forced Dawn to not think about anything. Not about Lucas or Team Galactic or where her Pokemon had been taken—or especially _why she was even being kept here._As she illustrated her fantastical ideas, her mind went completely blank. Sketching afforded her a place to vanish into and not come out until she was satisfied. She could push the sour emotions from her heart and be at peace.

The day that Dawn lost a part of herself began when she was, in fact, drawing. It was approximately six in the morning, and while her breakfast digested, Dawn had decided to doodle her favorite feathery companion. She sat cross-legged on the twin bed, grabbed a sheet of paper and a pencil, and started to draw Piplup. Carefully portraying the mental image she had of her Pokemon and transposing it to paper, Dawn somnolently scribbled it down.

Two hours later, she finished and held her masterpiece at arm's length so she could critique her art. It looked nothing like the way she had envisioned—its fins were lopsided, its beak resembled a rectangle more than a triangle, and one eye was larger than the other. Dawn's sense of artistic merit was more on par with a preschooler's than a sixteen-year-old's.

But it was still a Piplup. And that made Dawn smile for the first time in ten days.

_I hope he's okay._

Knock. Knock. THUMP.

A sudden tapping came at Dawn's door, beginning lightly at first with knuckles, then descending into the slamming of a fist. Startled, Dawn glanced up from her design. Jupiter was the only person that was permitted entry to her room, and Jupiter did not knock. She always walked in without invitation, no matter what lame task Dawn was performing.

"Er, who is it?" Dawn asked, reacting in the only way she knew how.

"It's Jupiter," the deep, sensual base of her caretaker's familiar voice boomed.

"… Come in?"

Jupiter did so, standing rigidly at the entrance as she closed the door behind her. Dawn thought her posture was strange—Jupiter was an uptight and unfriendly person, but she seemed almost in pain now. "Get up," Jupiter commanded. "You've been called for."

Dawn blinked. "After ten days?" She stated inquisitively, incredulous.

"Cyrus has been busy," Jupiter said. "Now he's ready for you. Come on. You're a nosy child. He should be able to answer some of your bothersome questions, if he doesn't strangle you first."

"Okay." Not at all daunted by Jupiter's indirect threat of her boss's wrath, Dawn stepped down from her bed, straightened her coat, and walked up to Jupiter. Her drawing of Piplup fluttered behind her as she gripped it tightly in her hand.

Jupiter scowled deeply and pointed at the picture. "What is that?" She asked.

It was then that Dawn realized that she was still holding her doodle. "Oh!" She exclaimed. "I was drawing this when you knocked. I didn't know that it was still with me. I'll put it back on the bed."

"Not necessary," Jupiter denied. "There isn't enough time. Put it in your pocket and worry about it when you get back." She spoke with the weariness of an exhausted mother, scolding her hyperactive children. Dawn hesitated, but obeyed as she folded the drawing four times and stuffed the square into her coat pocket.

Leading her out of the room, Jupiter walked with an askance sway of her hips, leaving several feet of space between her and Dawn as they traversed the familiar but mystifyingly snaking hallways. Jupiter did not turn to her, converse with her, or even acknowledge that the young lady was following her. Dawn felt derelict. She knew Jupiter was not one for small talk, but being ignored was irritating. Usually, Jupiter was not so rude as to disregard her completely—even a cold "hello" was necessary once in a while. _What's her problem?_

After many footfalls against the obsessively clean white carpet and a myriad of turned corners, Jupiter and Dawn came upon two gigantic doors, at least a half-story tall and as colorless as the rest of the base's expansive, bland plane. The pair of Team Galactic grunts that were regularly posted outside her door paled in comparison to the undersized army that stood before these solid gates. Dawn counted at least twenty, maybe thirty.

Jupiter spoke in a muted tone to one of the guards, who nodded in corroboration and turned to quietly address his comrades. It was then that Jupiter finally accepted Dawn's presence. "This is Cyrus's office," she said. "You will follow the guards inside and be left alone with Cyrus for him to answer whatever questions you have. He also might give you a hint as to what he has in mind for your purpose."

Dawn's nerves were frayed, but she perked up at the notion of having her worried thoughts remedied. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me," Jupiter told her. "Thank Cyrus. It was him that made sure you were separated from the remainder of the prisoners and treated with more care." She placed a hand on Dawn's back and encouraged her forward to the grunts, the first time the Commander had touched her. "Go on now, girl," she said. "I will be waiting outside when he dismisses you."

Smiling genuinely at her, Dawn said appreciatively, "I am indebted to your kindness."

"I'm just doing my job," Jupiter responded.

Understanding that their exchange was over, Dawn accompanied the male guards to the doors. Jupiter watched as they pushed open the heavy entrance, the doors wailing as they parted to reveal Cyrus's enormous office. Without a word, the grunts nudged Dawn inside, and Dawn looked back as the doors were pulled shut behind her. The adolescent's naïve inky eyes met Jupiter's, showing the final strands of a tenacious soul as she was closed off.

And then she disappeared, into the belly of the beast.

"That picture was terrible, by the way," Jupiter muttered to herself. Having no other choice, she turned and walked away.


	6. Part 5

_Cyrus could not think about work. Normally, he rarely slept away from this large office of his, with its line of computers lining the walls by the entrance and the five two-story windows at the north end that showcased the brilliant skies of the this ugly planet. He was always toiling—his labor was important to the fruition of Team Galactic's plans. He needed to find entrances to the Distortion World, track Giratina, find Diagla and Palika's final resting places. There was no time for frivolous, meandering thoughts, as there had never been in his life. In order for his new world to obliterate this one, he would need to do work. It was naturally the only way to achieve that goal._

But today, he could not work. Any attempt he made at research was foiled by errant thoughts of the young pair that had tried to annihilate his base nearly two weeks ago. Why, after so long, were they suddenly on his mind again? The boy had been discarded in the prison to the wolves; Cyrus doubted that he would stay alive for long, if he wasn't dead already. His Pokemon had been relinquished and were currently undergoing training with his grunts to integrate them as part of Cyrus's plans. When he deliberated about the boy, he was not troubled. The boy's fate did not concern him.

It was the girl's.

He didn't know what it was about her that beguiled him. It was not her Pokemon, as they were meeting the same destiny as the boy's team. From a sideways glance, Cyrus knew that the girl would not be of much use to Team Galactic as a potential grunt or even a slave. She was so physically fragile, so emotionally rich, that there was no way she would survive. Cyrus stared out the vast windows at the cirrus clouds in the bright blue sky like Rapidash tails, moved gently by the wind, and continued to think about her and her purpose.

He recalled her heavy black eyes that shone with spiritual vibrancy, as if she believed in herself and her cause with the boy; that it was the foremost thing that she wished to protect with her life. The lustrous locks of her ebony hair fell over one shoulder as she bartered for her life and the boy's, for it seemed that her friend's well-being bore a great deal on her doubts. The girl had skinny arms and slender legs, a leanness that reached the rest of her body, to the flat and underdeveloped plane of her stomach and hips to her slightly rounded breasts.

What did he want with her?

Cyrus then realized he was thinking of her breasts and understood.

Curse this weak human body of mine.

_Cyrus understood that arousal and attraction were part of mere animal nature, but they were innate aspects that annoyed him to no end. His hormones had driven him to pursue women before, but he had always managed to detach himself from them before their relationships grew too serious. Cyrus wanted to be alone—his emotions did not drive his sexual conduct. Nor were they fixtures he had ever appreciated. Lust was a pointless distraction. Gods did not preoccupy themselves with such frolicsome needs. If he became the God of his new world—against the creeds of Arceus, Palika, Diagla, and Giratina—he could transcend human necessities like thirst or sex. After all, if emotions were easy enough to trump, Cyrus figured that essentials too could be destroyed._

That would be the perfect world. No conflict, no emotions, and no sentience. Finally, there would be peace. Finally, silence.

But Cyrus's pleasure in such silence swathing his office was disrupted by the sound of the entrance creaking open, crying in grievance at the arrival of a different—and more alive—soul than his. In his state of soullessness, it seemed that his office was a living being, and only tolerated him—and upon the appearance of one of his Commanders, the doors screamed on their enormous hinges, as if protesting their attendance. Accompanying the raucous shout of his inanimate entryway was the shuffling of small feet, then the smash of the doors closing behind then.

Cyrus turned around—and the girl was there before him, many paces away in the huge room. She had her hands shoved inside the pockets of her overcoat as she glanced around the room with her mouth agape in amazement at the tall ceiling and his numerous machines. She scanned the windows behind Cyrus's desk, enchanted by the robin's egg sky and its wispy, fluffy clouds. In fact, she seemed to be absorbing the room in its entirety by looking everywhere.

Except to Cyrus.

The minute he cast his vacant powder-blue eyes upon her, he was filled with a deep sense of hunger. It almost made him snarl like an animal, the aggressive manner in which he wanted to take her. This was the feeling of possession—the notion that he wanted to own her. Thrash her, bruise her pale, fair skin, and make her bleed at his mercy. He wanted her to get on her knees and implore him the way she had the night she and the boy had broken in. He wanted to pull her glimmering black hair and spread open the legs that glided her across the ground.

He desired to have power over her. To destroy her. And that was not an emotion to him, but a need. Therefore, for now, he was allowed to fulfill it.

The girl glanced over and settled her placated eyes on Cyrus and started, surprised, like she had not noticed him before. "He-hello," she stammered, removing her hands from her pockets and folding them politely in front of her. She looked down anxiously at her feet, not wanting to meet eyes with the Galactic leader. "Thank you for inviting me."

Cyrus merely grunted as he considered her heavy coat, her moderate skirt, and her big pink boots. Too prudish for a girl her age. That would have to change.

He made a gesture to one of two guest chairs before his desk with his hand before clasping them behind his back, staring her down. "Sit," he said. It was an instruction, not an offer, and the girl seemed to understand that. Hurrying from her stationary place at the doors, the girl rushed to Cyrus's desk and sat down meekly.

Cyrus wandered from the view of the windows to the front of his desk. He stood opposite her and leaned back against its wooden edge, crossing his arms across his chest. He watched the girl fidget and tremor. Although she did not indicate or tell him, Cyrus knew she was terrified. Eyeing her steadily, Cyrus waited for her to begin speaking.

"Um," the girl began. "T-thank you for giving me a comfortable room and food. I-I am very grateful for that, and if you'd be kind enough as to—"

"Jupiter told me you had some questions." Cyrus spoke in his dark monotone. He could not tear his sight away from her, but she had trouble lifting her face to his. That was fine for Cyrus. Her submissive nature was arousing to him. He wouldn't have it any other way.

Swallowing, the girl nodded quickly, her hair rippling at the action like tidal waves.

"Then ask them," Cyrus prompted. "I don't have all day."

"O-okay," the girl mumbled. Clearing her throat, she asked, "Where are my Pokemon?"

Cyrus frowned. He hadn't expect that to be her first question. "That's classified," Cyrus told her. And in truth, it was—all Pokemon of prisoners were to be taken and relinquished to Team Galactic grunts. This girl's team had been divided and distributed many days ago, he was sure.

The girl's head dropped further as she mourned the loss of her Pokemon, but she sensed Cyrus's impatience and moved on. Good girl, he thought. "Where is Lucas?" She mildly demanded.

"In the prisoner's ward underground," Cyrus said. "Where all captives go." And where they go to die.

_"All right," the girl said slowly, processing this information. "Is there a women's wing?"_

Cyrus snorted. He knew where she intended this to go. "Of course," he said. "Not all our enemies are male."

"Then why," the girl whispered, "am I not there?"

There was a hush that followed behind that dooming query—five words that sealed this young woman's fate. Cyrus permitted the stillness to linger, hang in the air in suspended animation, watching as the girl's breath bated as she anticipated an answer. If Cyrus was an expressive man by will, he would have smiled in amusement at his expert pupeteering. He was the outlet of solutions to this young woman. Without him, she would know nothing.

That alone gave Cyrus the delicious taste of control.

But it wasn't enough.

Reaching down, he pinched the girl's chin between his thumb and forefinger, jerking her face upward. She gasped as Cyrus forced her to look at him, her pupils wide as she regarded his unyielding countenance, her lips parted as she gazed at him faintly. Cyrus's mouth twitched. "Do you see me?" He asked.

The girl nodded frantically, his sudden motion having scared her.

"Stand up," Cyrus ordered, letting go of her chin. The girl, shaking in fear, got up from her chair, her bowlegged knees shivering as they tucked in closely together.

Cyrus grabbed her shoulders, spun her around roughly, and slammed her with her back facing him against his desk. One of his hands grabbed her arms and squeezed, twisting her hands behind her and gripping them to prevent struggle. The other descended on her neck to drive her to bend over, her chest mashing against the scratched surface of Cyrus's table. The entire movement took proficient seconds, pinning the girl to the point where she could not escape.

Sliding his free hand beneath her skirt, Cyrus's trailed the frilly edge of her panties. The girl opened her mouth and began to scream, now that she fully registered her position. The sound annoyed Cyrus, so he reached up and slapped her hard in the cheek. "Shut up," Cyrus growled. "Make another noise, and you won't have privilege anymore."

Immediately, she fell silent, so Cyrus continued. He grabbed her underwear and tore them off with great strength, not bothering with simple removal. As he undid his zipper, he grasped a fistful of the girl's hair and yanked hard, pulling her neck up from the desk. "Did you see me?" He hissed into the shell of her ear.

The girl nodded, quiet weeping flowing from her. A tear trickled down her cheek and fell in with a splash, forming a tiny puddle on the table. The sides of her mouth moved, as if she was trying to talk.

"I couldn't hear you," Cyrus sneered he pressed against her entrance. "Did. You. See. Me?"

"Yes!" The girl sobbed. "I saw you, I saw you!"

"Good," Cyrus said as he pushed inside her. "Never forget my face, and I will never forget yours. Does that sound like a deal?"

The girl only whimpered.

"Yes, it does." Cyrus answered himself. And he began to thrust.

()()()

When he was finished with her, the girl limped to the entrance upon her dismissal, completely overlooking the jumbled mess of her panties on the office floor. Her gait was injured, wounded, as a doted trail of blood followed her to the door like bread crumbs. Cyrus watched her go from his desk. He had crushed her spirit, and he was proud of that. She would be much more malleable and now of much more use to him. Despite her inexperience—Cyrus was certain the girl had been a virgin—he had enjoyed her. The girl now had a definite place, and her duties were known.

The doors parted to reveal Jupiter and a pair of guards, waiting for the teenager to reappear. The girl tripped and fell, and Jupiter dashed forward to catch her, but the girl merely supported herself with the Commander's arm before standing again on her own. The girl did not look back at Cyrus, but Jupiter did—and she glared at him with her fierce amber eyes, daring him to do what he did again. Cyrus blinked, unresponsive, as the doors closed behind the four. Jupiter did not break contact with him until the very last ray of light from the corridor outside Cyrus's office seeped away.

Cyrus got up from his chair and went around to where he had taken the girl and glanced on the floor, disdainful at the fact that he'd have to alert housekeeping a few days early of their scheduled cleaning. At the very least, he supposed he could dispose of the underwear himself. He knelt to pick up the cloth scraps—and brushed a piece of four-by-four folded paper beneath them. Curious, he retrieved the square as well and stood back up, opening it to see its contents.

It was a very poor drawing of a Piplup, which Cyrus believed to be one of the most feeble Pokemon in existence. The Piplup was not colored, but the state of its asymmetrical flippers and awkward webbed feet was so bad that Cyrus doubted that it would have made any difference. Most certainly, it was the girl's—perhaps it had fallen out of her coat.

He rolled his eyes. What a terrible picture.

_Refolding the picture, he slid it and the tattered panties into his pants pocket and made his way toward the windows again._


	7. Part 6

_"Is there a women's part of the prison?" Lucas asked Huey one afternoon as he stood in the lunch line in Team Galactic's jail cafeteria (the "slop and drop line, 'cause this ain't high school, kid," as Huey called it). He held his scuffed metal tray in his fingers, drumming them impatiently against the sides as the grunts dishing out the food moved with indolence. Lucas tapped his feet on the cracked concrete flooring to the beat of an imaginary song. Rob, who stood behind him and Huey in the line, smirked at Lucas's irritation._

_Huey coughed and turned around, staring down at the much shorter boy. "Son," he said, "if the only people that went against Team Galactic wielded penises, we'd all be bored as hell down here." A grunt slapped an unappetizing mixture of carrots and gravy on Huey's tray. The older man glanced down and scowled at the concoction, so disgusting its fusion that it could practically be classified as a Pokemon. Until arriving here, Lucas hadn't known gravy and carrots to be compatible together in cuisine—and, honestly, they weren't—but when he was ravenous, anything tasted good to him._

_From the early morning that he'd been cast aside into the prison, he had used Huey's pocketwatch to take time and determine the days' endings and beginnings, for there were no windows to gauge the rising and setting of the sun. Calendars were also part of the list that Team Galactic issued every week to remind prisoners of what they were not permitted to have, so Lucas relied on the aid of his cellmate to recall the feeling of lapsing time._

_When he woke up this particular morning, Lucas realized it had been three weeks since he and Dawn had been captured. He'd unintentionally gone three whole weeks without seeing her face—thinking about her every waking second did not do justice for him. He needed to see her, make sure she was all right. Physically, he knew that was impossible, as he was in a prison full of men and spying a women in the writhing mass was next to unfeasible. He'd tried not to let her weight too heavily on his mind by preoccupying himself with mindless tasks like eating and weightlifting—in fact, he'd been working out so much that the muscles on his arms and legs were beginning to balloon in size. When he'd weighed himself last week, he was five pounds heavier than he was when he'd arrived._

_But even exercise couldn't detract from his real concern. He wanted to see Dawn. He wanted to touch her flesh and see that she was still alive. Lucas would have given up anything just for five minutes with her._

_Excited by Huey's vague observation, Lucas thrust his tray eagerly at the Team Galactic grunt serving food and turned his head to his cellmate, his eyes glowing. "So there is a women's prison?" He asked, his voice laced with joy._

_Huey laughed out loud. "Whoa, now, kid," he chided. "You're only sixteen. I don't think you need to get laid just yet. Maybe next year." At that, Rob ducked his head and smiled out of eyeshot as he was given his ration._

_Lucas frowned. "I'm not interested in that."_

_At least not with any other woman._

_"Well, you're one in a million young men your age," Huey said, beckoning for Lucas and Rob to follow him to one of the elongated metal tables in the middle of the cafeteria. The trio sat amongst a reeking, vociferous mass of men as they howled with hilarity and ate noisily. Lucas went largely unnoticed by the other prisoners—which Huey told him was strange, because boys his age were usually instantly descended upon by sexually starving older men. "They sense something different about you," he'd told Lucas. "Use that to your advantage. Get stronger. Learn to resist any advances they make upon you."_

_Huey spooned a bite of gravy and carrots. "If not sex, what the hell do you want the women's half of the prison for?" He demanded._

_Lucas pressed his beret to his head in embarrassment, his defining feature that he'd managed not to lose yet. "There's a girl I know in there," he mumbled. "And I want to see her. We… we tried to take over the base together. I want to make sure that she's okay."_  
_Huey paused in mid-bite and gawped at Lucas. "You're telling me," he processed, "that you didn't try to take over this place alone?"_

_"N-no," Lucas stammered. "She was with me."_

_Closing his mouth, Huey dropped his silverware on his tray and leaned in, narrowing his eyes. "Tell me, kid," he said. "Did you love her?"_

_"Did I?" Lucas asked, flabbergasted. "I still do."_

_"Then let her go," Huey told him. He glared at Lucas with a hostile snarl, a fiery rage smoldering in his eyes like blackened coal. A chill attacked Lucas from behind, as if an icy breeze had snuck in through the poor insulation of the prison walls. "If you were stupid enough to put her in such jeopardy, she doesn't deserve a pathetic sap like you. Take your hat and your dignity and haul ass to find a woman that you didn't let down so terribly." Turning away, Huey shoveled food in his mouth and did not look over again at Lucas._

_Their half of the table fell into a stunned silence as Lucas sat in utter awe at Huey's angry verbosity. He'd taken Huey to be a good-natured—albeit tough—individual that had endured trials far beyond what he'd ever dreamed of in his sixteen years. He hadn't thought that Huey would be the type to lose his cool so suddenly and without any warning. Even a few of the other inmates paused in their debauchery to glance over in bewilderment—Huey, being a veteran, was known by everyone, and this eruption was very unusual of him._

_Upon hearing Huey's unanticipated outburst, Rob looked up from his slop and saw Lucas reach over and try to touch the man's shoulder in tentative worry. With his raspy, smoker's drone, Rob whispered, "Leave 'im be, Diamonds." Huey shot a bitter glower at Lucas, downed the rest of his food, got up, and stalked off promptly to dispose of his tray._

_Lucas gave Rob a puzzled and panicky look, and Rob merely chuckled at his distress. "Don't worry, little one," he said as he pushed his vegetable entrée around with his form and amiss repugnance. "Huey might seem like a sensible man on the outside, but he's raw and undone internally, like an undercooked steak, or a tangled ball of yarn. He does his best to cover it up, but sometimes someone says or does something that jacks that façade up. He's done it a thousand times before. About eight hundred of them were directed toward me." Rob smiled and laughed again, his sallow, rotting mouth of teeth bared in sordid glee._

_Rob was a man of few words—Lucas had learned that within the first week, as it took the former Bird Pokemon trainer that long to warm up enough to even greet him with a lofty hello in the morning. He refused to waste them as others did, and Lucas applauded him for that principle. But he was speaking now—and Lucas tuned in, because he knew it was important._

_"What makes him that way?" Lucas asked. "Team Galactic wrongly accusing him?"_

_Rob frowned scornfully as he diffidently ate his food. "Lower your voice, boy," he said. "There are guards in here that'll cut you open if they hear a single word of treason."_

_Sure enough, pantomiming as if they had heard him, Lucas caught sight of a pair of Team Galactic grunts shooting spears of contempt at him with their blank stares. Ducking his head just slightly, Lucas bent in over his empty tray. "Or is it something else?" He continued without shame._

_Simpering, Rob cleaned the last of the gravy from his dish with the side of his fork. "You're quite the nosy bastard," he said mirthfully. "But that's good. Nosy is never beneficial in regular prison, but in a place like this, it sure damn is." He stood abruptly, causing Lucas to tumble backward onto the bench where he'd sat formerly. Leveling his gaze, Rob said, "Come outside to the courtyard with me and I'll tell you everything. And about your girl—you'll get answers from me." Gesticulating with a nod of his head, Rob walked toward the dirty dishes bin. Keenly, Lucas got up and followed him, dumping his tray behind his cellmate and pursuing him out the exit of the cafeteria._

_Behind them, Lucas heard the snickers of men who had noticed them leaving and their lewd speculations about why they wanted such rare privacy. Lucas ignored them. They had bothered him once with their lechery and bitterness, but he found it easy to defeat their noise. As they left, the buzz droned on, until it faded into an oblivion that was far from beautiful._

_()()()_

_The quad that was connected to the partially underground Team Galactic base prison was one place that the guards were not allowed to accompany prisoners after a revolt of protest against a previous rule of no solitude bubbled. Once it was quelled, Cyrus commissioned for a small, eight-foot-by-ten-foot patio with a concrete foundation and a barbed-wire fence surrounding the entire rectangle, fifteen feet high—no tables, no basketball nets, and no defining features. It was a simple, enclosed space for prisoners to stretch their legs in. Its entrance sloped upward to allocate the enclave to the outdoors. Though it was hard to see around the sharp lattice, Lucas spotted a few trees framing the gray sky—but otherwise, there was no vegetation._

_"The world outside this place is vacant and desolate," Rob commented, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a package of cigarettes and a box of matches. "Everyone talks of escape, but if we do get out of here, how will we find our ways back home? The area around this base is deserted. It's out in the middle of nowhere, contained in a forest the size of Kanto. We'd all be dead by the time we got half a mile from here."_

_Rob clenched a cigarette between his teeth and lit a match, cupping his hand around the tip of the paper cylinder and the flame. Once the cigarette was lit, he shook the match to put it out and tossed the charred timber on the ground. He turned to Lucas and held out the packet to him. "Cigarette?" He offered._

_Lucas hesitated, but he felt it was rude to reject Rob's present, so he grabbed one and mimicked Rob in its placement. Smiling through his own, Rob leaned forward and retracted another match. "Don't suck in too much smoke, okay?" He warned. "Don't be too ambitious until you get used to them."_

_He ignited Lucas's cigarette, and Lucas breathed in. Immediately, he began coughing hysterically as he pinched the smoldering tobacco between his fingers and took it out, smoke spewing from his mouth. His eyes watered from the intense, spicy aroma, and Lucas wondered if he liked it or not._

_Rob laughed. "Yeah, it's always fun the first time," he rasped. "You'll adapt. Smoking is a good way to calm your nerves. Also ruins your appetite a bit, so you don't have to deal with that shit they call food here."_

_"It's… badass… too…" Lucas hacked between gasps for air._

_"Yeah, the ladies like it," Rob agreed._

_The two fell into a contented mutual silence as they puffed with a tranquil ease. As Lucas took more draws on his cigarette, his wheezing slowly died down as his lungs accustomed themselves to the smog, and he was soon able to breathe with ease. His eyes still burned, but the foul-tasting smoke no longer troubled him. Rob finished his cigarette before Lucas, but he waited patiently until Lucas blazed through the end of his before he began to explain._

_"Huey had a fiancée, you know," he told Lucas. When Lucas enlivened at that, he went on. "She was apparently a real nice girl. Tall, robust, gentle, and with legs up to her ears. Huey blabbed on and on about her the first month or so that I was here. He clammed up afterward, but he still called out for her in the night. You've lucked out these last three weeks. He's slept soundly. No night terrors or anything. Ordinarily, he cries like a banshee."_

_"He had a fiancée," Lucas repeated. "Not has. Had."_

_"She's dead," Rob said. "Or so I've pieced together. I heard him howling about 'her soul' and her 'lovely death' in the midst of his nightmares. Huey's never told me anything about her other than her personality and appearance, but you know what those psychoanalysts say about that shit—what people do not admit in consciousness, they will in the depths of their psyche or whatever. If she's gone, I have no idea how or when she died." Rob studied Lucas's pensive face as he processed the story. "But I presume it had something to do with him, judging by the vicious way he cut off your balls in there. Murder, I doubt. Stupidity, maybe."_

_"He must've put her in danger somehow," Lucas observed, "and she suffered because of it." Then, as if the thought had been creeping in his shadow all along, a cold and frightful impression stabbed him in the back. He felt the oozing of fear from his body as the perception snaked through his veins and replayed over and over in his mind like a broken record:_

_What if Dawn is suffering right now because of me?_

_"He blames himself for a lot of stuff that goes on in there, Diamonds," Rob said as he signaled to the entrance back into the prison from the quad, stirring Lucas into sanity. "Huey. People die all the time, usually due to illness or injuries or suicide from bulling by the rest of the inmates. Every guy—with me being the sole exception—that he's taken under his wing has perished under Team Galactic's deathly eye. Fate is inevitable, but he hates himself as much as he hates Team Galactic. He keeps saying 'Oh, I could have saved them' or 'If only I'd been there in time.' Of course, that isn't realistic, but Huey is just like everyone else—not all his worms are in one can, if you know what I mean."_

_"He's just traumatized, I think," Lucas tried._

_"If that were the only reason," Rob murmured, "we'd all be senseless by now." Turning to him, Rob waved at one of the pockets in Lucas's blue canvas cargo pants that were beginning to tear from constant use. He'd taken Huey's advice of washing his clothes, but they didn't seem to be holding out. "Enough about Huey. Give him a while to cool off, and he'll come around. You mentioned something about a girl in there. You got a picture or anything? I want to see what Snow White looks like."_

_Lucas brightened at the change of subject to one of his most favorite topics in the world. "As a matter of fact, I do," he said cheerfully, fishing around in his pocket until he found it. Taking out the piece of glossy paper, Lucas showed Rob the best photograph he had of Dawn. It was of her in the familiar scene of the Sinnoh shore, wearing an indigo bikini with satiny ruffles on the end. She was waving at the camera and flashing an adorable smile, poking a starfish that had washed up on the beach with her toe. Piplup was right next to her, imitating its trainer by lifting its tiny flippers high in the air. The print was yellowing at the edges, but Lucas enjoyed the vintage touch. It made Dawn look extremely sophisticated and Lucas an excellent photographer._

_Impressed, Rob whistled. "She's a cute one," he remarked as Lucas put the photo away. "She your age?"_

_"Yeah, she's sixteen, too," Lucas said. "This is actually of her right before we entered high school, so it's a couple years old."_

_"She your girlfriend?" Rob asked with a wink._

_Lucas blushed. "I wish," he mumbled, averting his gaze from Rob and staring at his feet, shoving his hands inside his pocket and tucking his neck down in humiliation. "We… We've been friends since we were born. I've always been in love with her, but… she's never returned my feelings. I keep hoping she will someday. I don't know if that's likely."_

_Rob hooted a belly-rumbling cackle and slapped Lucas hard on the back. Some lingering smoke in Lucas's throat surfaced unexpectedly, causing him to cough more. "Aw, don't be so down, little one," he said. "I've had a few girlfriends during my short life, but I can tell you that the key to women is patience. They can be sketchy and hesitant, but if you wait long enough, you'll get what you want."_

_"But I put her at risk," Lucas whispered, "just like Huey said. I don't know if she's even alive. I don't know where the women's prison is. And even if she is living, I don't think she'll ever forgive me."_

_"You're too self-doubting, Diamonds," Rob scolded. "Listen to me. None of us know where the women's prison is—but we do know that it's there. And we've heard rumors that the lack of lady inmates leads a better, more comfortable life for the few girls that are detained there. I can almost guarantee you that she's alive. Well, obviously, you can't put all your eggs in a single basket based on hearsay, but it's better than nothing."_

_Lucas felt a little better. Even if there was no concrete evidence, the very fact that someone knew that a women's prison existed comforted him. Rob was right—gossip was better than nothing on all accounts. He had to find this place._

_He had to find Dawn, before she slipped through his fingers and left him forever._

_"But something tells me your angel isn't in there," Rob said, instantly disarming Lucas's determination. Lucas passed him a confused expression. "Still in the base, but not in the women's prison. She's somewhere in this godforsaken shithole."_

_"How do you know?" Lucas demanded._

_"Just a hunch," Rob said. "Intuition does a man well, you know."_

_"So it's hopeless then," Lucas said. "I'll never find her. Is that what you're trying to say?"_

_Rob rolled his eyes and took a pair of cigarettes from their cardboard package. "Christ, don't you ever pay attention?" He grunted. "What did I just tell you? When it comes to women, you have to exercise patience. Serenity can take you many leaps and bounds, little one. I'm saying I highly doubt that she is in the prison, but that she walks above us, perhaps a free woman in certain aspects. A girl as pretty as her wouldn't be locked up with a bunch of broads to fester, I can tell you that much." He shoved one cigarette into Lucas's mouth. "Persist, and she might come to you. Now shut up and smoke another with me."_

_A girl as pretty as her wouldn't be locked up._

_Is she…?_

_Lucas was hoping that Rob meant something else._


	8. Part 7

Dawn's vision was blurry. She couldn't focus on a single person that stood outside Cyrus's office, waiting for her as if she were the carcass of a lamb gone to slaughter. Lines and lines of Galactic grunts stood with their pistols and boots; Dawn felt them staring at her with evident disregard. Their looks hurt almost as much as the tearing throb that pounded between her legs. As they leaned over to murmur to one another, their voices registered to Dawn as indistinct; to her, their words were ten miles away. The only person she remotely recognized with the hourglass and fuzzy purple shape of Jupiter, who caught Dawn in her soft arms as the girl fell forward.

As soon as the doors closed, Dawn could see again. It was as if being in Cyrus's presence rendered her senses useless—as she couldn't remember specific sights or smells of his office. And feeling. She definitely did not remember any feeling. Instead of hysterical, she felt dead. Before, she had held a blameless hope and reserved happiness at her good treatment. Now, she felt bereft of all emotion—Cyrus's skin had injected her with his emptiness. She was made a woman in the most disgusting of ways—and yet she didn't feel damaged.

Although she knew very well that she was. Damaged far beyond repair.

"Come on," Jupiter said, helping Dawn steady herself on her own two feet. "I'll take you to the shower room. Don't rush. Keep your pace, and I won't get ahead."

True to her word, Jupiter kept up with Dawn's slow rate, as her… wounds did not permit her to go much faster. In fact, Jupiter stayed by her side with every step and was there to support Dawn if she grew too weak to continue. The grunts that flanked them on either side shuffled awkwardly, and if they opened their mouths to express a word toward Dawn, Jupiter glared their imprudence down in a storm of rage.

"You usually ask so many strange things," one of the guards said meekly to Dawn, managing to slip by Jupiter's obstinacy.

"So Cyrus answered all her questions," Jupiter snapped venomously. "She has no more to ask. Now why don't you be quiet and do your job?" The entourage, clearly on edge, stalled and lost their wordiness for the rest of the trip.

Honestly, Dawn did not want to speak at all. She felt that speaking too cheekily had gotten her into this. Without her verbose questions, she might still be innocent.

She might still feel _alive._

When Dawn raised her head from her mortified, struggling gait, she noticed that she and Jupiter were already at the locker room—the same one that Dawn had seen on her first day and the same one she attended to every day. Jupiter turned to the guards and dismissed them, declaring that she would be able to handle Dawn singly. Leading her enduringly into the plain, benched place, Jupiter remained for Dawn to take off her clothes very sluggishly. As Dawn folded her garments and laid them on a bench, Jupiter said, "I won't leave this area of the locker room in case you need anything. Take your time in the shower. We're in no rush."

Dawn bit her lip and looked down. Why was Jupiter treating her with such sympathy? She wanted to shatter, impulsively retort that she didn't need anybody's help—that this was her battle. Hers alone. But Dawn's upbringing of thankfulness to compassion prevented that, and she scarcely bobbed her head in mute gratitude.

She limped into the shower room, picked her usual faucet, and turned it on lethargically, her actions now determined by rote memory. The water, scalding hot, cascaded down upon her head, and it took several long minutes for her to realize that she was being burnt by the stream. She cooled the temperature and slipped her fingers between her legs. Removing them, she saw that she was no longer bleeding. She was numb to that, and instead began to scrub her skin with the soap. Rubbing and rubbing, she tried to erase the filth that Cyrus had imposed upon her—there was a light film of dirty sex that made her feel like an ugly whore. But no matter how strongly she scoured her body, the emotion stayed. Dawn was still sullied. Everything, now, was hopeless.

She was now Cyrus's slut, and that destroyed her.

At this, Dawn sat down on the tile floor beside the drain, the spray from the shower still beating down upon her. She tucked her legs up to her chest and buried her face into her knees, holding back tears. Why? Why was she letting him get to her like this? He was only a man. A powerful man with a God-complex, but a man nevertheless. He was mortal—and mortality was a fate doomed at birth. Why should she let such an awful, soulless soul take advantage of her? He'd only… touched her, right?

He hadn't been inside her.

Perhaps if she kept telling that to herself, she could convince herself that she was still pure. Still a virgin. Not an inept, useless whore.

Just like Cyrus believed.

_Never forget my face, and I shall never forget yours._

"Girl." Dawn's dismal parade of thoughts was interrupted by Jupiter's familiar strict tone. Dawn peeked over her knees just enough to see Jupiter standing at the entrance of the shower room. The Galactic Commander was in the nude, her slick jumpsuit draped over one arm. Her curves accentuated and shimmied to the beat of her feet as she walked to a line of coatracks near the shampoo and towel cubbies to hang her clothing up. She headed over to the shower right next to Dawn, her strikingly long and slim legs approaching Dawn's vantage point.

"I supposed," she said, letting the water flow from the head, "that I should take a shower now instead of waiting until later." Squeezing a dollup of shampoo from a bottle, Jupiter lathered her hair thoroughly. Dawn let herself go and be mesmerized by the way Jupiter's purple strands darkened from the water, the foam sliding down her arm and dripping into the river leading to the drain from her ring finger. No such rings adorned them—Jupiter was just as lonely as she was.

_Oh, Lucas. Where are you?_

At that, Dawn began to cry.

Jupiter did not turn her head to face the girl as she bawled, her salty tears mixing with the fresh water and disappearing as lost shards into the piping. The Galactic Commander finished washing and, without missing a stroke, sat on the floor beside Dawn—she didn't even turn her own shower off first. She duplicated Dawn's position, but she did not seem close to crying. Instead, she leaned over on her seat, pressing the side of her body against Dawn's in a way that was not erotic—it was _friendly_. It was a woman's way of saying, "It's okay."

Dawn leaned back, and they sat there for a while as Dawn sobbed her frenzy and exhaustion into the shower's running creek. Slowly, her pain ebbed away, soaked up by Jupiter's kindness. The tears fell down the drain, swimming from their owner to oceans far, far away.

And then, there was peace.


	9. Part 8

When Dawn awoke the next morning, she nearly kicked a duffel bag that had been placed at the end of her bed. Instantaneously, she sat up in alarm. Who had managed to get in so sneakily during the night? Had she really slept so soundly through the night? Surely, Cyrus had not made her… _that_ tired. Physically, she felt recovered, but perhaps it was her emotional reserves that were depleted and needed replenishment with rest.

Still, it unsettled her that she hadn't been skimming so thinly enough in the throes of sleep that she was able to wake up upon the entrance of the owner of this duffel bag. Reaching out cautiously, she poked the scratchy black material with her big toe. She jumped back, expecting a horde of Ekans to erupt from the seams, but nothing happened. In fact, the bag moved at the light touch, indicating that whatever was inside did not weigh much. It wasn't contracting or making any untrustworthy sounds, so Dawn deemed that the contents were not living. That was a slight comfort—that eliminated roughly six hundred lethal possibilities.

Guarded, Dawn slid out from under her covers and crawled to the foot of her bed, the Team Galactic nightshirt that Jupiter had lent her for sleepwear hiking up above her knees. Upon getting to her destination, Dawn sat cross-legged in front of the duffel bag, and a cold sense of disquiet gnawed at her. In the movies, when something was transported in a duffel bag, that "something" was usually millions of dollars in wads, the corpse of a child, or hardcore narcotics. It was too heavy to be money or a body, so Dawn followed her gut and presumed that someone had given her heroin.

Dawn noticed a note attached with clear scotch tape to the bag's handle. She snipped it off and read carefully. The handwriting was disengaged and choppy, as if the author had written to her in a hurry. On the lower left corner of the paper was a Team Galactic watermark logo—the paper itself was very fine, and Dawn suspected that there was more revenue in Team Galactic than she'd expected.

_Your old clothes seem frayed. I chose new ones for you. They are satisfactory, and I presume you will find no problem with them._

I will see you again at two o'clock this afternoon. Jupiter is already informed. I will tolerate no excuses. I'd like to discuss a thing or two with you.

Cyrus

_Cyrus!_ Dawn was slammed sudden with astringent rage at the leader. _He_ sent her clothing? What an insolent man! Recalling the grisly events of the day before, Dawn felt queasy and did not wish to open the duffel bag. The prospect of the contents unnerved her. After reading the note, Dawn now wished that Cyrus had sent her drugs.

Clothing was frightfully intimate. And in no way did Dawn feel intimate with such a monster. For a moment, Dawn thought of blatantly rejecting whatever outfit was inside. So she'd be tossed carelessly in the women's prison—she didn't care about that. That outcome was much prettier than what Cyrus already had her disposed for.

_But…_

She thought of Lucas.

_… is my fate the only one at stake?_

If, by pleasing Cyrus, would Dawn not only get reverential treatment—but would Lucas's future be ensured as well? If Dawn played her cards right, would Cyrus agree to that? He had to. Perhaps if Dawn pretended that she wanted him, desired to be his whore, he would relent and keep Lucas alive. A rush of hope bubbled within her, but was quickly quelled by the thought of what she needed to do to guarantee her friend's safety. She knew how much Lucas loved her—and how angry he would be, at Cyrus and at her, if he discovered that he could never be her first. But she had to. In the past, there might have been other options. But today, she knew what she had to do.

And if it meant Lucas's life was in her hands, she would do it.

"Oh, Lucas," Dawn whispered. "I'm so sorry. Please forgive me."

Dawn slid off her bed, trying hard to banish any haunting memories of Lucas that threatened to break her sanity. Bending over the duffel bag, Dawn unzipped the top. Flipping the limp flap up, she squeezed her eyes shut, praying that whatever was inside was not so explicit that she would be laughed at walking down the hallways.

Gathering her courage, she cracked open one eye to scan the interior; then she opened both, feeling asinine at her previous thoughts. There was a small stack of flawlessly folded clothes, a generic white bra and a few pairs of simple cotton underpants on top. The colorless shine clashed with the remaining colors of her other clothes, and she could not see what else Cyrus had chosen for her. But the undergarments seemed innocent enough. They were even brand-new, the tags from the store still attached. Vaguely, she wondered who had gone out and purchased them. Surely not Cyrus himself. He would be an odd sight in the ladies' intimates.

Pulling her nightshirt over her head, Dawn grabbed the bra and panties and put them on before turning to assess herself in the mirror. They fit perfectly. She looked very humble, which was what she preferred. And she loved the feeling of clean underwear, fresh from the store. Smiling with merriment, Dawn tore off the tags and placed them on the drawer before turning to retract the next article.

It was a figure-flattering black turtleneck tee—long-sleeved, so Dawn would no longer have to wear her clunky coat around the base anymore. Delighted, Dawn tugged it on and admired its ideal suit. So far, Cyrus's taste was not poor. _I suppose if I have to service him,_ Dawn thought begrudgingly, _I can do it for the sake of new clothes._

But when Dawn turned to the open duffel bag again, the last piece leaped out at her in bawdy shock. _A skirt!_ It resembled her old one in color and fabric and even brand, except this one was shorter than her knee-length number—much shorter. When she was in school, she remembered the unmovable rule of the dress code: regarding skirts and shorts, their length was appropriate when their ends reached the middle finger when hands were resting relaxed at a standing position.

As she took out the skirt and smoothed it out against her thighs, she saw that this one wasn't even close to that distance—truly, she didn't even think it would reach her thumb. She flushed. Cyrus expected her to wear _this_? Was it proper to question his motives, although they were obvious? She couldn't possibly required to wear this skirt.

It was degrading. Debasing. The very notion of having to monitor even the tiniest shift so her panties wouldn't show made Dawn retch.

Yet she knew she had to do it, as Lucas continued to intrude in her mind. Bitter, Dawn pulled on the skirt and looked in the mirror above her dresser. Yes, it was extremely short—she tugged constantly on its edges to increase its length, but to no avail. Turning around, she saw that the frills barely covered her white-clad bottom.

Dawn was red with both embarrassment and ire. _Couldn't he have at least picked pink underwear instead of white?_ That way, if her skirt blew up at any time, the situation might be made less awkward if the panties matched. But she knew arguing with the man would be fruitless, as he was too used to getting what he wanted. At least, that was what Dawn gathered about him.

Scoffing, she pulled on her boots and glared at her reflection in the vanity mirror. She looked like a slut. All the better for Cyrus, but it was a detriment to herself. She adored the turtleneck and the bra, but the skirt was atrocious. If anybody at home found out about this… she blushed at the mere thought of their incipient horror.

There was a knock at the door, and Dawn could tell by its reticence that it was Jupiter. She scowled, thrown off by Jupiter's sudden hesitance to enter her room at the drop of a hat, like Dawn expected her to. Briefly, Dawn recalled their moment in the showers together the day before. _Is she mulling over that?_ "Come in, please," Dawn said curtly.

Jupiter entered. "I'm afraid this may feel like déjà vu," the Galactic Commander told her, though Dawn did not turn to face her while she spoke, "but Cyrus wants you again."

Dawn was jolted with a chill of disgust. "Again?" She growled.

"Not like that, I believe," Jupiter said. "He brought up wanting to discuss… conditions with you."

_Conditions? What does he mean by that?_ Dawn was resentful, feeling cheated and cheap at her true use to the Galactic leader. He was probably just using the very official and legal-sounding excuse of "conditions" to molest her again. _I hate this bastard._ She missed Lucas still.

Banishing her errant thoughts, Dawn gathered her wits and followed Jupiter from her room without another word. The pair took the path that Dawn considered now to be a trail of doom—she knew how sorry the grunts and Jupiter looked yesterday as she entered Cyrus's office for the first time, and she felt like she was an inmate being brought to her execution on the electric chair. She was prey and Cyrus her predator. He wanted control? Then he would get it—and Dawn knew that as long as she played the part, perhaps she could get what she wanted.

_Lucas._

When they reached the office, a noise emanated from Jupiter's throat, as if she were about to say something to Dawn, but Dawn ignored her and stepped ahead. Shouldering her way through the army of guards that haphazardly protected the lair of the ogre, Dawn pushed on the large double doors by herself, shaking off all offers for aid from the soldiers. She knew that they pitied her, being the young bedmate of their marauder of a boss, but she would not let their feeble whining bother her. The doors were heavy, but she managed to open them.

"Dawn." She heard Jupiter call out to her as the gates parted, a familiar scene, and Dawn turned to see her. Jupiter stood at the very end of the throng of Team Galactic grunts where she had been left, making solid eye contact with the girl. Dipping her head respectfully, Jupiter smiled.

Dawn could never forget the kindness that Jupiter had imparted upon her the day before; how she had been there, both physically and emotionally, and wanted to play a key part in healing. This day, almost two weeks after her imprisonment, Dawn felt that she was finally making a friend.

Her eyes softened. "Thank you," she mouthed.

Jupiter saw but did not respond, though Dawn knew she understood. With her back to Cyrus's men, she went to see the dark man himself.

She was no longer compliant. She was no longer a lamb.

Now, she was angry.


	10. Part 9

_"What are these 'conditions' you wish to speak to me of?" The girl's voice sliced through him like a knife in water, and Cyrus was shaken from his workless daze as he stood in his usual place by the window. He tended to meander over there when there was nothing to do or if he was idling in wait, admiring the calm of the blue sky. Cyrus had always respected the sky—it was cool, composed, even as the world below erupted in conflict or terror. He wished that in his new world, the sky would remain the same. It was a symbol of steadfast sensibility._

_But his moment gazing upon such a restful sky was interrupted by the shrill, demanding tone of the young woman who had been so deeply occupying his thoughts lately. Upon hearing her voice, Cyrus became annoyed, but strangely aroused at the same time. She was a tease, but a cocky, infuriating one at that._

_"I see you've been fetched successfully," Cyrus said as he turned around to face the girl he'd taken the day before. "I wanted to applaud you for your… performance yesterday. You are quite the biddable little whore. You did thrash a bit, but you took me in stride. Congratulations."_

_The girl narrowed her eyes at him. "You're a creep," she rumbled. Cyrus did not like her resistance. It appeared that he did not nail her hard enough, or she would not be so bold._

_Punishment might be in order._

_"Creep is hardly an accurate term," Cyrus deadpanned. "I am merely a man fulfilling his sexual needs. I have no odd fetishes or off-putting perversions. If you were to attend to any other male on the planet, he would tell you the same thing." He began walking toward her, as she had not moved from the entrance since she arrived, evaluating her as he went. She looked quite charming in the turtleneck—her breasts were well-accented and smoothed round from the bra he assumed she was wearing beneath the dark cloth. And the skirt was especially pleasing. An appropriate length for what he had in mind with her._

_"Well, I think you're a creep," the girl decided. "Now tell me what these 'conditions' are. Or was that just an excuse to get me back in here again?"_

_Lashing out, Cyrus grabbed her wrist and held it before him. His eyes were dark and enraged, and his grip firm. The girl's eyes grew enormous in fear as she struggled against him, but Cyrus's other arm looped around her waist and seized her by the hip. He dug his nails into her, causing the girl to yelp. Further movements from her forced Cyrus's painful clasp deeper into her skin, so she stopped fighting and regarded him only with dread._

_"I will not take any sort of verbal or physical resistance from you," Cyrus barked. "If you dare speak to me with that dirty mouth of yours and spew your accusing nonsense again, I will not hesitate to damage you. I give the orders and ask the questions from now on. Don't you even think about it, you arrogant cunt. Am I understood?"_

_The girl was shivering now, her smug expression having melted into one of complete submission. Nodding frantically, the girl's body shook, thrown into the motion. A sense of triumph and power came to a boil within Cyrus. It amazed him what even the slightest of his rage could do to others—make them pliable, malleable, bendable to his will. That notion of absolute control satisfied him._

_"Good girl," Cyrus said in a low growl, releasing the girl. She jerked back as if jolted by an electrical shock. Cyrus noticed a fresh bruise on her wrist, shaped like his curved hand. "Now, if you'll be quiet, I actually do have conditions to discuss with you. Think of it as a contract for your… stay in this base, if you will."_

_The girl did not answer. She only exhaled loudly._

_"You are permitted to ask questions," Cyrus said, beckoning for her to sit at the guest chair before his desk like before, "as long as they are not too sarcastic. If you become too cheeky with me, problems may arise." The girl's face shadowed at that, perhaps imagining what "problems" she might incur—and what their admonishments could be._

_Cyrus had a few things in mind, but he decided to wait until she got herself in trouble._

_"For now, sit." Cyrus made his way back to his desk and pointed to the guest chair, this time much more insistent._

_Hurriedly, the girl dashed to the chair and sat down. Cyrus wondered if she felt the irony in this that he did—most likely, she did, for she was very perceptible, albeit strident. But this time, Cyrus did not stand around the front of the desk as he had before. Instead, he sat down in his chair, placing the table between him and his captive. "Now," he said. "I'm prepared to outline—verbally—your terms of imprisonment here. I will expect a few things from you in exchange for another few things from me. Does that sound fair?"_

_"Yes," the girl mumbled. She wasn't making eye contact again._

_"Yes, what?" Cyrus hissed. "And look at me while I'm talking to you."_

_The girl's face snapped up as she reluctantly matched his eyes. "Yes, sir," she responded._

_Cyrus nodded in approval. He leaned back in his chair. "You will not be kept in the women's prison block, as I threatened to you last time," the Galactic leader began. "I will make sure that you are kept in your current quarters with sufficient bedding and weekly cleaning. You will still be provided with three meals a day. However, I don't want you getting too plump, so you shall be permitted an hour's walk around the perimeter of the base every day, accompanied by the guards outside your room." Cyrus blinked at the girl, making sure she was listening. She was, so he continued. "Jupiter will make sure your clothes are laundered twice a week. During that time, you will wear your old clothes. Once in a while, if I feel your wardrobe is outdated, I will chose another new set, as I have with the dress you are currently wearing."_

_He saw the girl blush and glanced down at her skirt, tugging at the hem testily._

_"Any other requests you have, make them to the guards," Cyrus instructed. "If they are major, they will pass them through me first. If not, then they shall ensure that they are fulfilled. Any questions on your pay?"_

_No words. The girl only watched Cyrus steadily and shook her head. Her strength seemed to be returning, as was the color to her petrified face._

_"Now, what you will do for me," Cyrus said. The girl stiffened, but he ignored her. "I will not require your services on a daily basis, but you'll be called for regularly. Five times a week, perhaps, at the most. Yesterday was a test, and you passed it with flying colors. I was certainly gratified." He sniffed curtly at her. "When you come here, I expect you to be wearing that skirt. I've seen you fiddling with it since you arrived. I understand it's a bit short, but you'll have to bear with it. Do not cave to the temptation to don your old one unless it's in the wash. Clear?"_

_The girl nodded darkly._

_"Good. Now do you have any more questions for me before I send you on your way?"_

_Startled, the girl glanced up at him in surprise. "You don't want me today?" She inquired._

_"Don't look so insulted," Cyrus said, rolling his eyes. The girl flinched at her acerbic words and glared at him as if saying,_

_ That would connote that I actually cared about your opinion."I'm not feeling up to anything today. I told you, you will be called  
when needed. Are. There. Any. More. Questions?"_

_"Actually, yes," the girl said. Cyrus huffed with disdain. He wasn't expecting that. "I have a request to make. It's a light request, really, but I know your guards don't have the administrative clearance to do it."_

_"Spit it out, then." Cyrus was displeased. He needed to get back to work, and this girl was obstructing him. She was probably holding him on purpose, the bitch._

_"Lucas," she said. And that was all she said. But it was enough._

_There it was; a single word—and it lit Cyrus's veins on fire. He knew what she was asking. The girl wanted to see the friend she'd tried to infiltrate his base with! What audacity she had! The nerve, to ask such a thing of him! Did she not know her place? No, of course she didn't. Maybe he should just throw her in the women's prison. That would sober her._

_"No." Cyrus's answer was immediate. "No, you cannot see that boy."_

_"Why not?" The girl whined. Cyrus tensed. She was trying his patience._

_"Because you know I can't allow you to do that," Cyrus snapped. "It's a breach in protocol. Letting two captured usurpers convene? That's practically asking for you to storm my base again." Narrowing his eyes, the Galactic leader said, "And, as you know, I don't take kindly to resistance." Briefly, the day before popped into his mind. No, he definitely did not._

_"What if your guards are with us?" The girl said. Cyrus almost chuckled. She was trying to reason with him—the moment was parallel to her pleading the night she and the boy were caught. "Two or three of them. That way, we can't possibly confine in each other about anything like that. Please?"_

_Cyrus shook his head, adamant. "Still too risky," he said. "How do I know that you two don't have a code?"_

_"Please," the girl repeated in a whisper. Her eyes dropped, very sadly and tenderly. "I just want to see Lucas. I want to make sure he's all right. Nothing else. I give you my word. We won't discuss anything pertaining to… that."_

_There was no mistaking from her poignant expression, the way she twisted her skirt in her fingers, the broken way she mangled her speech. She loved the boy—that much was blatantly obvious to Cyrus. Of course, it was not foolish romantic love; it was something much worse. It was the love of friendship, the love of caring. And to Cyrus, that was even more unbearable than finicky affection. He hated friends—when brought together, friends were always the most disgusting people, laughing and talking and bringing up stupid inside jokes that left bystander out._

_But he pondered. Could he trust the girl? He knew that two guards would not be enough to monitor the pair. Perhaps five at the least. Or six or seven. Plenty to curb any attempt they would have at physically overpowering his grunts. Perchance, he might need to call Saturn or Mars to stand with them. It could be done._

_He was not sure that he wanted it—no, he was entirely sure that he didn't want it. But whores must be kept happy, or else their customers would not be._

_"What if I told you," Cyrus began, and the girl glanced up, "that I will allow it?"_

_The girl sat there for a beat, processing what Cyrus said. For a split second, pure joy rose on her face, but it was quickly replaced by a countenance of realization. Her sweet lips parted as she prepared to speak, knowing and understanding fully was what was expected of her._

_"If you told me that," the girl answered, "I would think that you needed something in return."_

_Cyrus nodded slowly. She was catching on. "Yes," he said. "And what do you think that might be?"_

_Sighing, the girl stared at her hands. Cyrus noticed that they were scarred and calloused from the attempt two weeks ago—completely healed, but still dotted with the occasional festering boil. Team Galactic had an on-staff physician. She needed salve for her wounds; she was lucky that no infections had broken out. Cyrus made a mental note. Curiously, the girl stood up from the chair, its legs squeaking as she pushed the furniture behind her. Reaching around the back of her body, Cyrus heard the sound of a zipper._

_Warily, the girl let her skirt and the white cotton panties Cyrus knew she was wearing drop to the floor. She stepped on them, as if disgracing the Galactic leader's choice of feminine attire. She walked around his desk, distractingly half-naked, and slung one leg over Cyrus. She straddled him, sitting astride the man in his office chair. Throwing her arms over his shoulders, the girl looked him unwaveringly in the eye._

_To his surprise, Cyrus smirked. He was amused. "It isn't enough to sit on me with no pants, girl."_

_"It's an invitation," the girl said blandly._

_"That is clear," Cyrus said. He undid the zipper on his pants, pushing inside her with another word—and not a break in eye contact. Entertained by her facial expression as he entered her, he watched her nose crinkle and her muscles contort. She was still new to the feeling. The girl made a noise that he perceived as discomfort—not pain, but mere irritation._

_He was still in control._

_As he should be._

_"I'll let you see your friend."_


	11. Part 10

_It took days—days, over one little incident!—for Huey to speak to Lucas again. The pair was in their shared cell five days after Huey had exploded in a rage of reminisce on Diamonds. Huey was lifting some weights that he'd pilfered from the gym, grunting and sweating excessively, and Lucas was lying on his top bunk, reading a paperback novel of Rob's that had the first few pages and the cover torn from it. From the contents, Lucas gathered that it was a cheesy romance, as the vast majority of the scenes were of either the dramatic or pornographic sort between a blonde doctor named Lorraine and her smoldering construction worker husband, Lewis. Of course, Lorraine was having an affair, but Lucas was becoming bored of the book and found it easy to nod off._

_After he'd skimmed through a few chapters in silence—excluding Huey's noises of exertion—Lucas couldn't ignore the simmering tension between him and his other mentor. Slamming the book shut, not at all concerned with losing his place, Lucas turned to Huey. "Hey, Huey," he snapped. "I don't mean to be rough and pissy, but let's solve this like diplomatic men. What did I do that made you so angry with me?"_

_At that point, Huey was tiring of weightlifting and placed the weights on Rob's bunk, the twenty pounds of the combined heaviness making the soggy mattress sag. His broad, fat shoulders heaved as he collected his strength, a child with his scattered marbles. Turning around, Huey opened his mouth and started to speak utter nonsense that took the guise in a form of guilt. Lucas suspected that Huey was only apologizing because Rob encouraged him to, but after a few jumbled excuses, Huey sighed deeply and shook his head._

_"Look, kid, I'm sorry," he said frankly. "I just don't know what to say. I shouldn't have clawed your ass like that in there in front of everyone else. It was a dick move, and I sincerely apologize." He bit his lip, trying to sort his words in his brain. "Rob… told me everything you said to him. About you and the girl. And it kills me that I couldn't muck through my shit long enough to give you the advice that he did. I hope you'll forgive me, Diamonds."_

_"I have already," Lucas said softly. He admired this man—and he could give him leeway for cracking at a bitter memory. Already, Lucas was growing intolerant of the recollection of Dawn being torn away from him. "Can you answer something for me, though?"_

_"Sure," Huey said after a brief moment of hesitation._

_"Rob told me you had a fiancée," Lucas said. "What's your story with her?"_

_Huey's eyes went dark instantly with hooded secrecy. "Someday," Huey told him sternly, "when I get over it, I'll tell you." Turning his back to Lucas, indicating that the conversation was over, Huey lifted the weights from Rob's bed and started to work out again. Lucas had already experienced a rough patch with Huey, and now that they had resolved their differences, he didn't want to create more turmoil. No longer questioning, Lucas picked up his book, chose a random place, and started reading. But he did not do so without thinking._

_He wondered what this woman was like. Rob said she was apparently beautiful; though Rob was a shady character, he seemed to be the type of person that appreciated a strong girl. Maybe she was short and fat like Huey—or tall and slender, exactly his opposite. Was she sassy and grudge-holding, too? Stubborn? She was probably a redhead. Huey was quarrelsome, so red hair would suit him well in a woman. He knew nothing, but by the way Rob retold Huey's tales about her, one thing was definite—Huey loved her. He loved her with the bottom of his heart, and Lucas understood completely how that felt._

_When he wanted to remember love, he always thought of Dawn in her bikini on the shoreline of Sinnoh, laughing and playing and looking at him with her black eyes. She regarded him with adoration. Not his level of adoration to her, but friendship. Hope. Affection._

_Maybe Rob was right._

_Maybe he just needed to wait._

_Maybe she would come to him._

()()()

_"You've been called for, prisoner."_

_Lucas looked up from his book again twice in the same day, riled that he was being disturbed from his cheesy material. It had been roughly an hour since Huey had sincerely opened his heart to the boy—the former sailor was now in the gym, returning the weights, and Rob was milling elsewhere in the prison. Lucas had been left uninterrupted in his reading as Huey slipped out of the cell, but now, twenty minutes later, unfamiliar voices shook him from his deep consideration of Lorraine as an imperfect bitch._

_His head snapped up at the deep intonations, presuming them to be nosy inmates, his mouth poised to bark at the intruders. But instead, he met the eyes of two staid-faced Galactic grunts in their stupid uniforms and laughable hairstyles. Their ray guns in hand, they eyed Lucas with bland summons._

_"What do you want?" Lucas demanded resentfully. "I'm in the middle of a book." He hated these people. What did they want with him? As far as he was concerned, he'd been a model prisoner. Working out quietly, spending time only with Rob and Huey—the sole men he trusted down here—and cleaning his plate. He hadn't sparked any fights or stirred the cauldron of trouble. All he wanted was to be left alone with his book and his thoughts of Dawn._

_"Are you deaf, boy?" The Galactic grunt to his left said. "You've been called for. Someone would like to speak with you. Your name is Lucas, correct?"_

_"If it's your leader, tell him to go eat shit," Lucas thundered. "And no, my name is not Lucas. It was Lucas. It's Diamonds now."_

_The grunts flinched visibly at that and scowled deeply at him, fingering their guns, probably debating whether or not to incinerate him. Lucas took a silent pleasure in that._

_ Serves them right, the pompous 'd developed a poisonous mouth from his few weeks in jail, and he was growing proud of it._

_"No," the same Galactic grunt replied, this time in a warning growl. "A girl. Speak harshly again and you won't be seeing anybody."_

_Instantly, Lucas's heart leaped. A girl! Could it possibly…? He then paused. It could be a trap. Perhaps they knew his weakness for the beautiful Dawn that he had partnered with and were baiting him. Perhaps they were here to lead him to his end—his execution. He laid his eyes on them momentarily, narrowing them in suspicion. He couldn't trust them. Of course not. To trust them would be suicidal._

_But…_

_He was optimistic for nothing else, was he?_

_Sighing, Lucas placed the book face-down on his dirty bedspread and got up, climbing down the rickety, creaking metal ladder from the top bunk. His marred sneakers hit the floor, the rubber soles shredded to pieces and his feet stuffy and uncomfortable from weeks of wearing the same pair. "Fine," he said. "I'll go. Willingly. Don't cuff me or anything."_

_"You might try to overtake us," the second Galactic grunt input, gruff._  
_Lucas rolled his eyes at him. "I have no weapons. Seriously, pat me down if you don't believe me. You guys have ray guns. I have my beat-up fists. Who's gonna win?"_  
_The Galactic grunts exchanged exasperated looks, chewing on this carefully before gesturing to him. "Come then, prisoner," the first grunt guard told him. "We will believe you. Understand that any resistance will be met with your immediate death."_

_"I get the drill." Lucas shoved his hands in his pocket and headed over to them. Removing a lighter from his pocket, he clicked the top aimlessly. The grunts appeared tense and alarm at the steel container, so Lucas shrugged and put it away. "Either of you got a cigarette? I'm famished." Lucas had been smoking outdoors with Rob for the past two days and found it considerably easier to light up with his adult friend. In fact, Rob was so proud of him for his newfound straightforwardness with smoking that he'd presented him with a gift—a lighter with a dark red finish, the one Lucas had been flicking. Rob had bought one before getting caught and thrown in prison, and he preferred matches anyway, he'd said._

_The grunts stared at him disparagingly, as if he were an animal. "Let's go," the same grunt said. Turning on their heels, they marched out. Lucas, still wary, followed them out._

_And not once did he wonder how Dawn, another prisoner, had the power to call for him._

_()()()_

_They led Lucas to an ultramodern interrogation room within the deeper bowels of the prison, the walls painted with a bright white finish and glinting off the two-way, transparent window placed on the single door that he and the grunts entered. In the center of the snow-colored box was an industrial-grade metal table and two chairs. All three piece of furniture were bolted to the floor, which Lucas realized was false, titanium-reinforced wood as he walked on it—meaning the room was not flammable. Lucas remembered the lighter in his pocket and glumly wished that he could just burn the place down._

_One of the Galactic grunt guards pointed to the chair on the side of the table facing the door. "Sit," he ordered. Lucas frowned. He didn't like being bossed around, but he understood that these people had the means to kill him if the wrong chord was struck. Huffily, he moved to the chair and sat down, his hands folded before him on the table. He noticed then how poor his nails were—chipped and brown with collections of dirt and grime, and so long that they could be considered weapons in themselves._

_The grunts took their places on either side of the windowed door. Lucas felt this was distasteful. Why did they have to stay here? Surely two teenagers couldn't overpower them alone. Or were they worried that Lucas's sharp fingernails and frightening lighter would devour them whole? He snickered, losing his slightly debonair pretense, and the grunts glared at him._

_"Quiet," one said roughly, and Lucas closed his mouth, gritting his teeth. Oh, what it took not to punch them._

_Suddenly, he perceived a shadow on the other side of the window, and the shimmering gold doorknob—the only thing that wasn't a drab color in the entire room—turning slowly. The door opened just a crack, barely large enough for someone's head to pop through, and a slight, feminine figure slid in sideways like the consistency of a Tentacool. She closed the door behind her, and met Lucas's eyes with warm informality._

_There she was. Dark hair, dark eyes, tiny form, and with a silvery smile on her handsome face._

_Dawn._

Oh, Rob, you bastard. I love you.

_Lucas's heart flew into his throat and was caught fluttering as he flushed red and stammered to find his speech, stuttering like a machine gun. Dawn watched him with her characteristic cheerful glow, cocking her head to one side adorably. Finally, Lucas trashed the words, as he was too flustered and overjoyed to speak, and jumped to his feet. He rushed toward her and grabbed her in a strong embrace, squeezing her so hard that he thought her spine would snap. The Galactic grunts jolted and braced for impact, but calmed as they realized he was merely reuniting with the girl._

_"Dawn!" He cried, burying his face into her shirt, inhaling her sweet scent as if he would never hold her again. "Dawn, Dawn, Dawn! Oh Arceus, it's really you!" He bathed in the silkiness of her hair against his cheek and the tautness of her muscular back beneath his fingers. Her breasts pushed against his chest as she wrapped her arms around him in response, and the plush heat made him feel giddy._

_"Yes, Lucas," she laughed, her voice muffled by his stinking, torn clothes. "I'm alive. And you smell like a Muk. How long as it been since you took a shower?"_

_Lucas drew away from her and placed his hands on her shoulders, staring into her eyes, swimming in their murky depths. He needed this. He needed her. And now, by the blessing of Arceus, he had her! "We only get a shower once a week," Lucas said. He'd hardly noticed his ear-to-ear grin. "I wish I look as good as you do right now." He assessed her appearance and saw with a note of excitement that she was wearing new clothes—a firm ebony turtleneck that flaunted the curves of her bulging bosom and an appealing little pink sherbet skirt that was much shorter than the last one. Lucas liked that. "Damn, nice threads. What, do the women get better things in prison than the men do?"_

_At that, Dawn's beam faded and was replaced with uneasiness. She bit her lip and fiddled with the edge of her skirt, a habit that she'd done as a child and still did now when caught in nervousness or small lies. "Erm, Lucas, about that," she said. "I'm not in the women's prison."_

_Lucas started. Had Rob lied to him? No way. "There's not a women's prison?" Lucas asked._  
_"No, you misheard me," Dawn said. "I'll repeat. I'm not in the women's prison. There is one, but I'm just not there. I'm being kept above ground. I'm quartered in with the grunts."_

_Lucas licked his lips and gnawed on them, staring at Dawn with a confused gaze. Wait, what? How could she be with the grunts? She wasn't actually… being recruited, was she? No, that was impossible. Dawn was a spirited individual—she would never agree to something like that. She'd die before such an allowance was made. Flummoxed, Lucas reached up with one hand and played with a lock of her hair, spinning the glossy tendril in the pads of his fingers. "Dawn," he said, just to speak the gloriousness that was her name._

_"I know what you're thinking," Dawn said with a slight smile. It didn't reach her eyes, and Lucas was stabbed with a pang of worry. Now that he noticed it, none of Dawn's usual jolly motions seemed natural. In a way, they appeared forced, as if she was trying to act normal for him. What was happening to her? "They aren't making me a grunt. I'm still Dawn. Free and for freedom. Three weeks doesn't change me too much." She reached over and gripped his upper arms, pressing them twice. "And look at you! You're a muscle machine. Impressive. That's kind of sexy."_

_Lucas let the "sexy" comment slide. Dawn said those sort of teasing things all the time. "But you're not happy," he translated._

_Her eyes softened. "Oh, Lucas," she whispered, her face crumbling into an expression of despondency. Straightaway, Lucas was alarmed. This was not the hopeful Dawn he knew—something awful had happened. "Why would I be happy here, of all places?"_

_"Dawn," Lucas said quickly, tucking the strand of hair he was playing with behind her ear. "What is going on?"_

_Dawn parted her fleshy, cherry-red lips at Lucas, a sad but alluring pout that reflected with unfathomable sadness in her vision. She touched Lucas's dirt-caked, calloused hand with hers, trailing the place where his fingers had brushed her earlobe. The soundless but loving manner in which she connected with him in that moment made Lucas heartbroken but aroused. He wanted to kiss her. If the guards were not here, he would have done that. He wanted to make love to her gently, and he knew that such emotion wasn't merely his hormones acting up. Always, he had wanted her. It was just now that they were nearing adulthood that he wanted to share himself sexually with her._

_"Dawn," he murmured, his voice hoarse._

_"Lucas," she responded, clutching his palm._

_Without warning, a voice boomed, separating them with its slicing words. "It has been five minutes," one of the Galactic grunts bellowed, as if he had not witnessed the scene unfolding before him and instead operated like a robot. Stung, Dawn hurtled backward to the door, her eyes wide with shock as she turned to the pair of guards. Lucas glared at them viciously. How dare they interrupt the two of them! "Dawn, you must be getting back to your quarters. Master Cyrus instructed that you only meet with this boy for such a duration of time."_

_"Cyrus?" Lucas mumbled to himself. That blue-eyed, emotionless guy who looked like he was fifty? Was he Team Galactic's leader? Who did he think he was, bossing Dawn around? Better yet, what did he have to do with her?_

_Dawn's shoulders drooped. "Oh, right," she sighed. "Can't disappoint him, of course." She headed toward the door without a backward glance at Lucas. She reached for the doorknob, twisting it. She was suddenly so cold, so deeply shaken, as if she were about to do a chore she absolutely detested._

_"Dawn?" Lucas said meekly. He felt rejected. Hurt. Betrayed. Where was she going? Oh, why couldn't she stay? He had to be with her for just a little while longer. She was his sanity._

_Flipping her hair, Dawn turned to Lucas one last time and smiled at him. Again, this one did not extend to her eyes. "I'm sorry, Lucas," she said lowly. "I have to go. I'll ask Cyrus if I can see you again soon, I promise. I've really missed you. I love you. Please, stay alive for me."_

_Lucas's heart throbbed with unshed tears. "I love you too," he said back._

_Dawn disappeared through the door. And, at the last minute, pain flashed in her eyes._

_And suddenly, Lucas got it._

_He understood why she lived in such royalty._

Cyrus's hands on her waist. Under her shirt. Unclasping her bra. Unzipping her skirt and peeling away her panties. Cyrus's mouth against her chest. Her belly. Her…

_"No," Lucas groaned. He brought his shaking hands to his temple. Why? Why? Oh, why? He wanted to be her first. Her last. Her everything, just as she was to him. Why? That bitch! No, it wasn't her fault. That dick Cyrus! The blame was his! Bastard! Goddamn bastard! Shit-eating, girl-raping bastard! How the hell did he…? He was empty! Soulless! How could he feel desire? Sex was for the privileged, not monsters like him! Maybe he was just overreacting. Maybe this was all in his mind._

"A girl as pretty as her wouldn't be locked up."

_Rob was a veteran. Meaning Rob was always right._

_It was then that Lucas started to scream, and he wished for the first time in his life that he had never seen her._


	12. Part 11

"Are you finished, then?"

Cyrus was standing outside the interrogation room, waiting for Dawn as she emerged alone—the guards inside were poised only to take Lucas back to the prison. Dawn hadn't come by herself—Jupiter had led her here, for Cyrus would never allow her to meander the halls of the Galactic base unaccompanied. He had his own troupe of grunts trailing him, their eyes wide with curiosity as Dawn exited. She was a bit of an oddity to them, a young woman her age so favored by their omnipotent boss. Of course, it was no secret as to what her purpose was, but she still incited a form of wary interest among the other members. Their nosiness made Dawn feel ill.

She didn't make eye contact with Cyrus, but she could feel his cold gaze upon her, boring holes of ice into her, as if marking her under his tenure. Feeling queasy, she pulled at the hem of her too-short skirt once more, something she'd been doing a lot recently. That old habit came back only in days of severe anxiety.

"Yes," she murmured, keeping her head low. She knew that her best bet was to act obedient. Cyrus was easily the most controlling, selfish man she'd ever met, and she understood that pretending to bow to him was the only way to appease such a jealous spirit. Submission was the key to her survival. She clenched her fists, her meeting with Lucas flashing by in her mind. The gentle manner in which he'd touched her, stared so adoringly at her, and his soothing tone upset her. Lucas was still the same happy-go-lucky boy he'd been since they were children, although his physical growth was evident.

He knew nothing—and she hoped that it would stay that way.

She was doing this for him, after all.

Cyrus nodded. "Good. Let's get going." He indicated to his guards that they were leaving and shot a sharp glare at Dawn, the strength of which made her heartbeat hurdle. Cyrus gestured to his side, ordering her over to him. Dawn sprung forward and met his request immediately, trying her hardest to ignore the sizzling tension that crackled in the air between them. Why was he so angry? What had she done this time? As much as she didn't want to admit it, she was scared of Cyrus. He was so incredibly difficult to read that every errant glance frightened her.

A sudden spark of nausea made her body lurch. _Did he hear us in there?_Cyrus said that the walls of the interrogation rooms were soundproofed, but had he been lying? Had he been looking in the window? Her back had been to the door—but Lucas faced it, and he made no motion that there was a spectator. But Lucas had a one-track mind. There was a possibility that he hadn't even been paying attention to whomever was outside looking in.

Dawn shook the thought away. It wasn't of her concern now. If Cyrus was embittered, he'd bring it up later when they were… alone. "Are we going back to your office?" Dawn asked quietly.

"No," Cyrus said. "You've had quite a bit going on today. I think it's sufficient that you rest. I'm going to walk you back to your room."

Flinching, Dawn sensed the irony in Cyrus's voice. That morning, Cyrus had taken her not once, but twice on top of his desk, deadpanning that it was "payment" for her reunion with Lucas that afternoon. By the end of the second round, Dawn felt used, sweaty, and exhausted, but Cyrus had given her time to recoup before allowing her to get dressed and see her friend. Indeed, she was tired, and her sleepiness was only amplified by her guilt from leaving Lucas so early. She only partially departed the interrogation room and his smiling, relieved face because of the five-minute time limit—the other half of her was overwhelmed by remorse that Lucas saw her in such a dirty, slutty state. He'd complimented her clothes, but he was unaware of the circumstances that gave her such nice things. In short, he was still Lucas, even over a month after their devastating capture and thwarting.

But she was not the Dawn that he had grown up with. She was a new Dawn—a more mature, serious, and passive.

And she was ashamed to be that Dawn.

"Let's go," Cyrus snapped, a bit rougher.

They went. Dawn still didn't meet his eyes.

()()()

When they arrived at Dawn's room, Jupiter stood beside the door and slipped her prisoner a very covert but comforting, motherly smile. Dawn's heart warmed right away. Ever since her stroke of kindness in the shower room after Cyrus had her for the first time, Jupiter and Dawn were becoming increasingly relaxed in each other's presence. Although there were a few days afterward of awkwardness, they thawed gradually to each other. Dawn was now unafraid to tell Jupiter her fears or worries, and Jupiter always listened with a open ear—and not the annoyed one she'd had in the beginning. Jupiter was the only member of Team Galactic—other than her boss, of course—that knew every detail about what went on behind Cyrus's closed office doors with Dawn, and she was not disturbed or bothered by it. She welcomed Dawn almost as a daughter, or a younger sister.

Dawn wished that Jupiter had been the one to pick her up rather than Cyrus, for the pair had walked in utter silence with the guards tailing and gossiping in a muted whisper. Cyrus's hands had stayed folded behind his back and Dawn's silky black curls making a curtain around her face to hide it from the dangerous man. There'd been nearly a foot of space between them, and neither were particularly eager to bridge that. Cyrus said nothing about Lucas, and Dawn didn't bring anything up about him. Instead, there had been silence.

And that was just fine with Dawn. Cyrus was only entitled to have his way with her. He wasn't deserving of her words.

"How was the meeting?" Jupiter asked Dawn.

"Fine," Dawn said. "He smells a bit odd, kind of musky." She frowned, loosening up greatly and almost forgetting that Cyrus was still beside her. "And his voice was a little raspy, too. I think he's taking up smoking." Not that Dawn condemned him for that—Lucas probably did so just to fit in. Smoking was a gross addiction to her, but she loved Lucas and was eager to dismiss it involving him. He was much more muscular and twice as handsome now—and Dawn admitted, for just a moment in that interrogation room, she saw Lucas not as a childhood friend, but a very erotic man.

But she'd just let herself slip. She'd never felt that way about him before—never had a twinge of sexual fire in her heart for that boy. Dawn attributed that brief attraction to Lucas as a byproduct of Cyrus's ugly idea of sex. A lump slithered down her throat. Good Arceus, she hoped that Cyrus hadn't noticed that about her.

"Captives often take up that habit," Cyrus said absently, "as a way to establish themselves in the prison hierarchy."

His gravelly voice made Dawn shiver and bite her lip. She hated him. Why was his speaking? Didn't he know that the sound of him made her want to scream?

"It is a common thing," Jupiter agreed. "Come, Dawn. It's getting late. Your dinner will be here soon, then I'll take you to wash your clothes and have a shower." The Commander looked over to her leader. "Unless you need her for something else?"

Dawn went rigid. _Please say no._

As if reading her mind, Cyrus shook his head, and Dawn's shoulders slumped in respite. "No, I have nothing else for her today," he said. "She's all yours." He placed a hand on Dawn's back and gave her a small shove, urging her forward. Dawn scampered over to Jupiter, her stress releasing itself with each step.

Or, at least until Cyrus spoke again. "But I'll need her in my office tomorrow morning when she finishes her breakfast. I want to talk to her about today's meeting with the boy."

Dawn trembled. Sure, _talk._She knew what he wanted, and even now, after so many days of this, it still angered her deeply.

"Of course, Cyrus," Jupiter said.

The Galactic leader inhaled loudly and nodded to his Commander before shifting his dark, even gaze to Dawn. A creeping emotion that made her want to shrink back into Jupiter like a meek child overcame her. "Sleep well, girl," he said. For only a second, he seemed to hesitate, as if he were going to say something more, but he grumbled inwardly and turned around, strolling away with a confident but plainly troubled gait.

Cyrus had never once been troubled in all the weeks that Dawn had known him.

Dawn barely heard Jupiter try and start a conversation, for now, she was lost in thought.

_What is the matter with him?_


	13. Part 12

_Cyrus woke up, awash in cold that bathed him from head to toe with a definite dread. He groaned and cradled his head in his hands. Why couldn't he sleep? He swore that this was the fifth or sixth time in the same night that he had been forced awake by some ambiguous nightmare or solid terror. Outlandish, madcap dreams seemed to haunt him tonight—the contents of which he barely remembered. Usually, if his dreaming was irksome, it would often be about mundane, average fears, such as the deaths of his Commanders or the failure of Team Galactic's plans._

_But tonight, his trances of sleep were much more unsettling than before. In wakefulness, he recalled dark clouds, churning and rumbling, as if they were about to unleash in a violent thunderstorm. His dreams held no color—instead, there were faces painting its walls and ceilings. Faces he knew; his deceased parents', his living grandfather, his Commanders, his grunts—all glaring at him with clear condescension. For once, since he was a boy, Cyrus was disturbed. What had he done that made them disrespect him so?_

_Then, their faces would disappear. And they were replaced by one—the girl's. She stared at Cyrus, her round obsidian eyes glinting as he mouth moved in a faint plea. He couldn't hear what she was trying to say, but her tiny voice was rushed and urgent, exhorting him to do something that was for sure outside his circle of power. After a brief interval of this, she stopped and gazed, waiting for him to respond._

_Cyrus could not control his answer, but it came anyway. "No, girl, I can't help you." He'd said it every time, in every dream. What was he saying no to? He did not understand._

_"Well," the girl answered after a short period of contemplation in a tone that rang with the lucidity of church bells, "I suppose I'll have to kill you, then."_

_Her face began to melt, the skin leeching like candle wax, oozing and turning her expression from straight-faced to a mound of limp, squished liquid flesh. From the bottom of the pile emerged a new head—this one the red beret-clad, diamond-eyed anger of the boy that Cyrus had thrown in the prison weeks ago. The boy that was still alive, against Cyrus's initial assumption—and he turned upon the Galactic leader with temper. A cigarette was clenched between his yellowed and rotting teeth, a long, scarred gash extending from the apple of his right eye to the base of his jaw._

_When Cyrus saw him, he felt as if he were staring into the jeweled judgment of Death._

_It was then that Cyrus was jolted awake and laid there, sweat soaking his undershirt and boxer shorts from underneath his weighty comforter. He preferred to keep the base's core temperature low, so how could he be hot? The nightmare had made him that way—five or six times, to be precise._

_Sighing, incensed, Cyrus rolled over to the side of his double bed and got up, ignoring the body-sized stain on the sheets where he'd been. It was evident that he was not going to get any sleep tonight. Why was that? He had done his duty with the girl today and allowed her to meet with the boy. She had looked as if she wondered if he'd listened in—why, of course he had. There was a fully functional microphone system installed in every interrogation room with recording technology, access to which was restricted to everyone but Galactic Commanders and himself. He hadn't seen their interaction, but he'd heard every word of it. There was no way Cyrus would tell the girl that he was enlightened about each exchange between them during that five minutes._

_Not that there was much to listen to, Cyrus mused as he paced back and forth restlessly at the foot of his bed. The two had spoken like old friends, blathering on and on about one another and expressing worry and pleasant surprise at their conditions, and they hardly seemed to be speaking in code. The girl had not revealed any sensitive information—perhaps she did sense that Cyrus was eavesdropping after all. Still, Cyrus did not trust her enough to believe that she would continue being innocuous in meetings and allow her privacy, even if his grunts were inside the room at all times. Guards were stupid and foolish. They were never attentive to nitpicking detail._

_He rubbed his hands. The last thing he had said to the girl today was when he left her with Jupiter at her room and told his Commander, "I need to see her in the morning after she's finished her breakfast." Of course, when he later mentioned that he needed to "talk" with the girl, he was insinuating sex—but now, after so many nightmares, he wasn't feeling up to such carnal relations. In fact, the idea of sex at this moment turned him off greatly._

_But he still wanted to see the girl._

_He wanted to just… talk to her._

_Why? He saw her as nothing more than a fleshly object that needed to be fed. Why in this accursed world would he be interested in anything that she had to say? Indeed, she was a crafty brain and fairly diplomatic, but other than that, she was incredibly boring. Had she not been of further use to him, Cyrus would have called for her execution already. Having an enemy of the Team so close to him was life-threatening._

_Yet something drove him. Something guided him blindly to put on his black shoes and pants, to grab his white everyday shirt with the Team Galactic logo on the left breast and slip it on, as if he were going to work at this hour of the night. Something controlled his legs and made him walk to the entrance of his lavish bedroom, walk out, and make sure the door was locked behind him and that the key was in his pocket. Something compelled him to go—in the direction of the enormous halls of the grunts' quarters._

_Something made him go to her._

_He hated that something._

_But that something wasn't going to let him wait until morning._


	14. Part 13

_Jupiter had gone back to her own quarters a long time ago, Cyrus assumed, as the only listless souls that stood in front of the girl's room were the pair of night shift guards, dressed in their rote Team Galactic uniform with their guns clipped to their belts. Their eyes drifted, directionless, as the late hour spoiled their sense of wakefulness. Their lids drooped, and light, half-asleep snores originating from their milling bodies._

_Upon seeing them, Cyrus gnashed his teeth. They were lazy and foolish. They should have been more aware of their position. What if someone came in the night to attack or rape the girl? Would they even notice until well after the deed was done?_

_Why did he care?_

_"Men," he said briskly, his presence having gone unobserved until now, despite the fact that he was standing practically in front of their blank faces. At the sound of their boss's voice, the grunts jolted to attention in a single bound, terrified to have been caught slacking by him. Their once lethargic eyes were now wide, regarding him as if he were a vampire, ready to consume their blood in one fell swoop. With a balking, synchronized step backward, they gaped at him, stunned that he would come here at this hour._

_Cyrus glared at his sheep disdainfully. "I expect you to be awake on guard duty," he hissed._

_"Y-Yes, sir," the one on the left stammered. Cyrus narrowed his eyes, unable to pinpoint his painfully average face and disgustingly generic lilt. The Galactic grunts that worked beneath him had become nothing more than a blend of repetitive faces and similar-sounding names. He couldn't recall the title of a single man or woman that was any less in rank than Saturn, Mars, Charon, and Jupiter. Not that it mattered, anyhow—most of them were such collective androids now that they responded to a simple "you."_

_"No matter," Cyrus sighed. He didn't have time to worry about this specific pair of pests. "You two are temporarily dismissed. I need to speak with the prisoner alone in her room. Come back in twenty minutes, and if you fail to reappear, you'll be executed. Am I clear?"_

_"Crystal, sir," the other grunt answered with a docile, feeble attempt at being humorous. Cyrus glared at him, and he stood down with a cowardly slump. Good Arceus, why did he hire dolts like these? They did nothing but serve to aggravate him. He gave them a curt not, and they scampered off without a word of questioning or resistance, like the obedient colony drones that they were. Of course, it was only then that Cyrus realized that it was Saturn doing the recruiting of grunts, not him._

_I'll have to talk to that irresponsible bastard about upping our standards a bit._

_Cyrus stared at the door into the girl's "cell," and he momentarily hesitated. He knew perfectly well that she hated him, and that she would rather die than see him at all—especially so late, when she was trying to rest and recover from the day's "events." Absentmindedly, he checked his watch, which glowed a persistent 1:49 in the morning. His mysteriously harmless urges had brought him here at a time that was certainly atrocious, even to him. Perhaps he shouldn't even go in. Maybe he was making a mistake in endeavoring to see her._

_Then, all of a sudden, he was disappointed in himself. Wasn't he, Cyrus, the one in control here? It wasn't the girl that had beckoned him forth—it was his own mentality, his own drive, that forced him out of bed and to her door. This ploy was not the girl's, it was his. He had absolutely no reason to believe that it was her that led him here, but simply his normal human impulse to get something "off his chest," so to speak. He knew that the other Commanders wouldn't be interested in his issues at one o'clock in the morning, especially since they all were all firm in their beliefs that Cyrus had no problems. Obviously, the girl was the answer, and that was why he was here._

_Reassured by the conviction that he was here by his own power, Cyrus reached for the button that opened the bedroom door. The grunts' rooms were not locked externally and could be entered by any stranger whenever necessary. No robberies occurred because of this, as the grunts had very few personal possessions and were generally not sexually interested in each other. Cyrus had not yet been reported a break-in or vandalism, so the open lock policy was kept. The electronic door slid open, illumination from the hallway spilling into the girl's cramped but dark room. Vaguely, Cyrus could see the shaded lump beneath the covers that held her sleeping form, as the sudden influx of light did not wake her._

_He stepped inside and the door closed behind him._

()()()

_The girl's room was a strange oasis of peace that he had never before seen in such a cozy, compact area before. None of his grunts ever seemed to build the ambiance that the girl did in this little enclave, and she had about the same amount of personal belongings as his soldiers did: few, if any. Besides her bed and vanity with the mirror, there was nothing that seemed to boast her private touch. Nothing, at least, at first glance—until Cyrus lifted his eyes from the calmly sleeping form under the sheets and noticed drawings._

_Tens of drawings, taped to the wall adjacent to the door and across from the girl's dresser. They were all in the same scratchy pencil, ridden with holes poked through the paper and tiny bumps lacing the serrated granite lines that made up poorly-sketched Blastoises and Luvdiscs, Shellders and Empoleons. Not a stitch of color filled the formerly clean white planes—only gray stripes that formed the worst art Cyrus had ever seen. Was this what the girl did in her spare time, when she wasn't with him?_

Do not pity her, _Cyrus told himself. In a haze, Cyrus remembered the Piplup drawing on the first day that he had her. What had he done with that?_

_Carefully, Cyrus strode over to the girl's bed and looked down upon her. She hadn't the slightest sense that he was here—instead, she continued to sleep, her small bosom rising and falling with each measured breath. She was turned on her side with her back to the door, her inky black wisps of hair falling over her face like velvet drapery. Curled by her ajar mouth was her fist, clenching and loosening in the spasms of dreaming. When she slumbered, she looked almost angelic, a child and not a teenager on the brink of adulthood._

_Cyrus was tentative as he sat down at the edge of her bed. He didn't want to be too confrontational and wake her—somehow, as odd as it felt to him, it bothered him to try and rouse her too soon. He wanted to watch her sleep. It was soothing to him, healing his discomfort from his dramatic nightmare. For several minutes, that was all he did—study the twitch of her muscles and the occasional crinkling of her nose as her soul ran blissfully through a fantasy that Cyrus wished that he could see._

_He did not know happy dreams, for he was soulless, unlike her._

_That realization made him feel distinctly empty._

_Reaching over, Cyrus began to stroke her hair, amazed at how supple and willowy it remained, even after many days of generic shampoo that the grunts used in the shower room. Most of their heads were gritty and knotted, not brushed and tidy like the girl's. Jupiter must have lent her a comb. Silently, Cyrus thanked the Commander for that. She was taking good care of this prisoner, as he instructed. He was fascinated with the way her ringlets bounced back when he gently twisted them, making his daydream about how easy they might be to braid._

_The girl squirmed a bit, rending the darkness with her movement. Cyrus thought that she might be merely dreaming, but he watched as her long, shadowy eyelashes parted and she opened her eyes to stare at him. When her turgid gaze settled upon him, Cyrus felt a foreign feeling of warmth engulf him, as if he were being coddled by a mother._

Feeling! _How dare he feel? He banished the emotion as soon as it came. He would not feel. He would not._

_At that point, the girl had registered his presence and sat up immediately, clutching the sheets to her chin in apprehension. His attendance surprised her greatly—Cyrus expected this, seeing as she doubtfully ever assumed that he would come to her instead of the other way around. She regarded him with her doelike countenance, fawning and innocent but still fairly adverse. "Er," she mumbled. "H-Hello."_

_"Good morning," Cyrus told her with as much indulgence as he could. She was a skittish animal, and the weary hour was tiring him and not setting up his usual reaction to her—solemn and cold. She was already startled enough, and Cyrus feared that he wouldn't be able to speak with her if he dismissed his gentle intentions in favor of more… brutal and customary ones. Ones that he was used to._

_"Morning?" The girl looked confused. "It's already morning? But the lights are still off." She narrowed her eyes, slipping her vision past Cyrus to the wall clock beside her mirror. Cyrus hadn't seen that primarily. "Oh, it's early morning."_

_"Yes," Cyrus insipidly agreed. He didn't know what else to say. Small talk wasn't his suit._

_Rubbing the drowsiness from her eyes, the girl focused on the Galactic leader again. Briefly, Cyrus discerned her apparel—a large sleeping shirt and a pair of the white cotton panties that he had chosen for her. He had no qualms that the tee was borrowed from Jupiter. How… abnormal for that woman to befriend an inmate. Around him, she was efficient and businesslike—and it had never occurred to him that she was just like every other worthless human being, finding acquaintances and striking friendships._

_"I didn't think you would…" The girl hesitated, weighing her next words. "… uh, want me so late in the night." He saw her agitation as she wrenched the bedclothes in her fingers, in the same nervous style that she often did with her skirt around him. It was an anxious habit—and for some reason, Cyrus found no incentive to break her of it. "And why didn't you call for me? I mean… this is an uncomfortable place to—"_

_"I don't need that right now," Cyrus said. "I'm being honest. I… I just wanted to see you."_

_The girl openly gawked at him, stunned that he, of all people, had the sentimentality to appear without salacious intentions. Cyrus was insulted that she felt that way—after all, he was a human as well. He disregarded emotions, but he did not dismiss hunches or mental prompts. He, too, followed his gut as well as any normal citizen did—he just did so in a clandestine fashion and without parading his thoughts or fleeting feelings._

_"Oh," the girl said. She seemed to be at a loss of words. "Is something the matter?"_

_Cyrus wavered. Should he tell her? He hadn't confessed his turmoil to someone since he was a child. "I… had a nightmare," he said, subdued. "And…"_

_"You needed to talk to someone?" The girl finished._

_"Yes, I suppose that's right." Cyrus shoved back his embarrassment. Shame was for pessimists and weaklings._

_The girl was quiet, but only for a moment. She was thinking. "Hm," she said after a while and Cyrus ticked away the raw seconds as her mind meandered. "What was it? They say that the nightmare won't happen again if you tell someone about it."_

_"I…" Cyrus's tongue was thick, swollen with his burning desire not to spill his torture. Why did he have such difficulty with his language around her? It was as if he was truly worried about what her response would be—or if she'd even think of him in any way, even negatively, again. He couldn't comprehend one rational thought that allowed him an answer to this oddity. She was only a girl. A stupid simpleton and an illogical girl. Why did she perplex him so?_

_How could he not speak right now?_

_Why, and how?_

_"… I can't remember," he lied. That would have to suffice. If he told her, she would be horrified._

Wait—why do I care how she feels?

_"Oh." Cyrus saw her hard, scolding eyes soften, his misery now hers. "I'm sorry. I hate it when that happens."_

_Cyrus looked away. How strange—it used to be her that wasn't able to maintain eye contact with him, and now the tables had turned upon him. They sat in this manner for many minutes, with Cyrus eyeing the floor with feigned intensity and the girl radiating comprehension as she processed what to do next._

_And, on the spur of the moment, Cyrus perceived a warm weight pressing down on the top of his hand, tickling his bones and sending a physical spark that shot through his body, ending in a mystifying tingle at the tips of his toes. At first, Cyrus didn't like that, but then, he identified an alien sensation that spread over him, moonlit tide that filled his veins with a substance that was not blood. He glanced over and saw that the girl's palm had covered his own, her tiny, wraithlike fingers wrapping around his own, the clutch shaky and unsure. He flickered his sight upward to hers—and beheld the most mild, tender expression that he had ever read._

_"It's okay, you know," she said. "It's okay to have a bad dream every once in a while. You aren't perfect. I'm not perfect. Nobody is. You don't have to strive to be." She gave his hand a squeeze, which sent the same hot impression through him as before. "If you ever have a nightmare again, come and find me. Wake me up. And tell me next time, okay? Don't lie like you did just now." And, miraculously, she smiled._

_After all that Cyrus had put her through, this girl could still smile._

_He didn't know how, but she was smiling._

_And he realized that the flood in his body—this flood that was not lust—made him feel good._ He felt.

_He was not in control._

_Somehow, for the very first time, that did not bother him._


	15. Part 14

_For seven days—one agonizing week—Lucas barely slept. The rage building in his heart did not allow him to close his eyes for longer than a few hours, as if eternally on alert. At night, he tossed and turned, his eyes refusing to close as harrowing images of what that bastard was doing to his friend, his girl, his_ Dawn. _He should have known when he stared into Cyrus's azure, vacuous eyes that he would try to pull something like this. Dawn was the most beautiful girl in Twinleaf—no, in Sinnoh, Lucas was sure, and she was his best friend. For years, he believed that he was the luckiest boy on earth. He'd shared her with Barry and his family, who absolutely adored her exultant smile and charisma. But never, ever had another man approached her when he was around. It was as if they were meant to be, future soulmates, and others sensed that invisible notion. They seemed to refuse to disrupt that._

And now, he was crushed. Lucas was not Dawn's first. That was the only thing he'd ever wanted—to be her lover and take her to newborn heights that neither of them had experienced. He loved her so much—he'd loved her, and he still did. Seeing her broken and dressed in a manner he now understood was whorish and meant for the Galactic leader shattered his heart.

Dawn was being abused, and he was powerless to stop that from continuing.

When he did sleep, Huey told him that he growled and spoke tongues, incoherent names of anonymous demons that feasted upon his dreams like Hypnos, creeping in the safe cover of darkness. His nightmares were plagued with visions of Cyrus, doing unspeakably awful things to the girl he coveted as she lied naked, sore, and bloody on his bed. Her face was contorted in pain as her screams ripped the sour air in his reverie, causing his whole body to quake with pure hatred and bloodlust toward the Galactic leader. He'd grip her slim waist and maliciously grope her breasts, leaving fingerprint-shaped bruises in his wake before slamming into her with sadistic force. Lucas was a voyeur during this, petrified, wanting to tear Cyrus to pieces and slit his throat. But his dream persona was not permitted movement. He was utterly bound to these murderous images.

During the day, Lucas constantly slipped away to smoke. The nicotine addiction gave him brief respite from the haunting thoughts, dowsing them in a charcoal steam and extinguishing them for a few moments. He found himself whittling through a half-pack a day now. Encouragement from Rob to ration his cigarettes went ignored—if he didn't smoke, he'd surely kill himself. His appetite decreased, and his muscle bulk production dragged to a steady halt. Lucas was fine with that—if he got any bigger, his locomotion would be reduced drastically. Besides, after a month and a half of working out, he was muscular enough to fend off a potential rapist of any size.

Yet it wasn't his body that made the prisoners wary of him—it was the pristine anger within him, boiling with the red-hot intensity of a cauldron. The resentment seeped from his pores and sprung from him like wildfire, searing the skin of anyone who passed him. It even had a smell—cigarettes and kindling, the scent of a hopeless addict. Rob and Huey were concerned, as Lucas had not exchanged word with either of them since he'd come back from his meeting with Dawn, but the fellow men who had committed their own infractions against Team Galactic were merely baffled. How, they wondered, could a boy of sixteen harbor such intense loathing toward something that was not tangible to them? Many presumed—correctly—that it was indeed a woman troubling him, but a small few wished to test him. After all, under the protection of Huey, none of them could even get close.

But one evening on the seventh day of Lucas's silence, one man in particular decided that he was going to ruffle Lucas's feathers in precisely the wrong way. Lucas had seen him before—his physical makeup was not unlike Huey's, as he was short and pudgy and reminded Lucas of the roly-poly bugs he and Dawn used to poke with sticks and bury alive when they were children. This man was no different from the rest of the pack that Lucas did not associate himself with—wandering listlessly in the prison hallways, having no intention of working out or reading alone, and making glaring eye contact with all who dared to approach him. He'd bothered Lucas in the showers a few times with snide comments about his thin but well-built exterior, but Huey had always intervened before either of them could strike out. Besides that, Lucas never thought too much about him. He did not know the nameless man's crime—and he didn't really care. Lucas was here to mind his own business, as long as the nosy prisoner did the same.

However, Lucas knew by then that nothing was sacred in incarceration.

It was right before the call for dinner, and Lucas was pacing back and forth in his cell. He'd just smoked a cigarette out on the quad, but he couldn't stop his hands from shaking. He was feeling withdrawal, and not from the tobacco—but Dawn. On this night, she was much more prominent in his mind than in days before. Cyrus disappeared, but the thoughts of her wreaked the havoc of natural disasters on him. Pausing, he gripped the rusting metal pole that supported the left bunk where Rob and Huey slept and dropped his head, gasping for breath.

Cyrus had reduced him from man to mouse. Why was he letting the Galactic leader get to him? Most likely, that was not even his intention. He wanted Dawn, but not as Lucas did—he desired her selfishly, egocentrically, like the slimy bastard that he was. As far as he knew, Lucas was not aware of their trysts.

But Lucas did know. He read it on Dawn's face. She was impossible at hiding things from him. It killed him.

And made him want to kill.

"Hey, sugar," a languorous voice purred from the entrance to the cell, which was wide open due to protocol. "You look a little lonely. You sad without Robbie and Huey around to make love to you like the bitch that you are?"

Lucas was swarmed with aggressiveness, his suppressed irritation stimulated by the man's creepy cadence. He looked up and over to the unknown man slowly, his vivid diamond eyes glimpsing the world surrounding him with ire. The squat, greasy blond was leaning against the robust iron bars, his beady black pinpricks of eyes staring at Lucas's lean, strapping body hungrily. Lucas knew what he wanted. And with Rob out for a smoke and Huey in the exercise room, there was no one to stop him.

Beleaguered with acid queasiness at the man's stare, Lucas stood upright and met his gaze calmly. Take one step closer, and you're dead. "What the hell do you want?" Lucas demanded. It was a reasonable question, albeit a useless one.

The man giggled. Not chuckled, giggled. Lucas's stomach turned at the mockingly innocent sound. "Oh, baby boy, you know what I want," he said, winking at him. "You're pretty hot stuff. Young, muscular, and very sexy. You were a shrimp when you came here, but you're made your mark in such a short time. Make no mistake, every man in this prison wants to do you and your cute, tight ass. It's a shared fantasy."

This was news to Lucas. Not welcome news, either. "Screw off," Lucas barked

"Even Rob and Huey, you know." The man continued to speak in his soft, sinister voice as if Lucas had never said a word. "Rob especially. He's a flaming faggot. We all knew that when he came here. Sure, he's rejected everyone that's come up to him, but he's taken a liking to you, I can tell. And Huey? Since his fiancée got her rocks off with some other guy and he flipped her over a moving boat, he's always needed somebody like you."

Lucas's heart turned to ice. Huey… killed his girlfriend? No way. That wasn't possible. Huey was kind-hearted and gentle. For him to be a murderer was out of the question. First, Dawn and Cyrus, and now this? He desperately hoped that was nothing more than prison gossip. Did Rob know? No, he almost certainly did not, as he'd conspired with Lucas about Huey's girlfriend the day that he told him about the women's jail. He looked up to Huey—and he was innocent until proven guilty.

"And there's popular confab right now," the man egged on, "about that little slut that you tried to take over this base with. She's Cyrus's lover, isn't she?" He stopped momentarily, visibly relishing in the way that Lucas's face twitched, speared emotionally by that comment. "I heard the grunt guards talking about her the other day. She's a hot topic. Apparently sweet as well. Too bad, a gorgeous girl wasted on an ugly, old dick like Cyrus. But then again…" A devious smile flashed past his lips for a split second. "… I suppose innate whores are supposed to be ready to hook up with just about anybody, eh?"

Lucas remembered his father's Typhlosion that he'd trained since boyhood. He and Dawn used to watch it battle passing trainers with aplomb, attacking with superpowered Flamethrowers and dodging attacks with surprising agility. Then, at the very end, as the energy that Typhlosion stored throughout the course of the battle, Lucas's father would order it to use Eruption—and flames would explode from the Pokemon, fatally singeing its opponents and leaving them in the heartless dust. Lucas had always wondered where that power had come from. After all, he'd learned in physics class that energy could not be created nor destroyed. Still, his father's Typhlosion seemed to fabricate that force out of thin air to bulldoze those that stood in its path. It was a puzzle that could not be answered.

Until now, because Lucas himself erupted.

All the rage he'd stuffed into the recesses of his brain detonated as he blindly rushed to the line of old, decommissioned steam pipes that weaved in an intricate web on the south wall of his cell. With one effortless tug, Lucas grabbed the largest and least intact one and pulled it off the wall, a shower of sparks and lead raining down upon him, but he could feel no pain. His vision was completely drenched in red as he focused his untamed eyes on the prisoner, who had finally ceased talking and was now staring at Lucas with interest. That curiosity turned to fear as Lucas advanced upon him, palming the pipe, his temper unchained.

"H-Hey, I was just kidding," the man said with a frantic laugh as he backed up against the bars, a cornered rat. "I-I didn't mean to piss you off! I'm sorry! Don't hurt me, please!"

Lucas was only dully amazed at the man's sudden change of cowardly heart as he swung the pipe. The steam pressure valve attached to the end of the cylinder connected with the man's temple with a sickening crack, his eyeballs bulging from the blow. Blood splattered from his mouth upon the floor as Lucas's victim cried and wheezed, his windpipe clogged from a sudden influx of the crimson liquid. He fell to his knees before Lucas and blubbered, begging for mercy.

Lucas could not hear him. He processed every sound as if he ears were full of cotton—distant and hazy, for his rage rendered him both blind and deaf. Without stopping, he continued to beat the man with his pipe, crushing his nose and pounding his face into an unidentifiable pulp. He barely heard the clambering of prison guards and nearby inmates that saw the commotion as they gathered around the cell, watching in timidity as Lucas yelled at the top of his lungs and drove his pipe deeper into the man's bloody, rearranged head. His vision blurred, and suddenly, he was crying—but his tears were not of sadness.

They were of triumph.

When he was finished, Lucas stared down blandly at the unconscious, disfigured tissue that was once a man's countenance, hardly registering how his forearms and his weapon were caked with a sanguinary red. His shirt and cargo pants were stained beyond repair. Vaguely, he remembered Huey reminding him to wash his clothes when it was time to shower. Only his red beret was untainted, sitting atop his head, as if nothing had happened.

A crowd had gathered outside the cell, a mix of Galactic grunts and prisoners. Not a soul stepped forward to gather the man or apprehend the boy that had attacked him; instead, they milled and mumbled among each other, a sea of confusion. Neither Rob nor Huey were present, Lucas noticed as a throb began to echo in his head. The manifesting ache in his skull was killing him.

He slung the pip over his shoulder and knelt before the man. Grabbing fistfuls of his clothing, he dragged the potential rapist to his face, his grey eyes stabbing him more mortally than his clouts had. "Don't you ever talk about Dawn that way again," he rumbled, the monotony of his voice silencing the throng outside. "Ever. Again." Raising his head back, he slammed his forehead into the man's as a final mark that the battle was over.

With a fresh bloody imprint on his head, Lucas got up. The twinge roared now, growing more and more intense with each movement. He did his best to blow it off as he turned to face the cell opening. The mob of men all took an instinctive, simultaneous step backward, collectively worried that they would be next. Lucas did look at any of them as he stepped over the comatose husk of a criminal's body and made his way out of the cell. The mass parted like the Red Sea, every set of eyes upon him as he walked down the corridor and away from all of them.

Dawn.

Who am I now?


	16. Part 15

**Sup, faithful readers! Silent-Protagonist here with a shoutout to a very special person! Mini people, thank you so very much for your constant support and reviews of this story. Your feedback makes me smile :) Keep up the good work!**

**Remember, my lovely stragglers! Don't forget to drop a line and tell me how I'm doing. Be honest-I do take constructive criticism well. **

**Thanks and enjoy this chapter!**

**- Silent-Protagonist**

()()()

Cyrus was not the same after that night.

Dawn found it strange—that Cyrus, of all men in the world, would be discomfited by a nightmare. A bad dream was something all people experienced, a hand that was dealt in the deepest throes of unsettled sleep. Dawn had nasty reveries constantly, but she had never been so bothered by them to attend to a friend about a particular one. Even Lucas did not know about the frightening images she held as she slumbered, as she usually got over them in a few days. But Cyrus felt awkward because of it—and that made Dawn wonder. What, exactly, had his childhood been like? How had it made him so apprehensive to process his emotions and share them with others—and desire to smother them completely?

Of course, she couldn't ask the man these inquiries, for she knew she would come off as impertinent; and during sex, there was nothing more disastrous than questioning one's partner about their potentially horrible younger years. Try as she might to build a resistance, Dawn still feared him with all her heart and knew that a simple change of mind for him would result in her instant death. Then all of her efforts—her ventures to keep Lucas and herself safe for just another day—would be fruitless.

But, as it seemed, Cyrus became markedly different after the early morning that he came to Dawn for asylum. No longer did he appear as the control freak, the constantly cold sociopath that Dawn had known him as for the past two months. Instead, he acted… calmer. Much more placid. He was still rough and demanding during sex, but he at least began to warn her before attempting anything drastic. His cruel silence when he was inside her turned to surprisingly mild words, warnings like, "Girl, I am going to do this now; relax, I won't hurt you." And, to Dawn's wonder, he didn't. The penetration that once had her reeling and sobbing against Jupiter's chest when it was over was now careful, as if Cyrus was suddenly afraid that he would affright her. He still looked at her and addressed her the same, but Dawn questioned if his attitude was changing. Surely not because of her—Cyrus hated her, for he used Dawn for only the same abhorrent deed.

"I don't understand," Dawn speculated to Jupiter one afternoon right before she was slated to see the man. She was sitting on her bed, dressed in Cyrus's prescribed outfit of her black turtleneck and the too-short skirt. Jupiter sat behind her with a handful of hair ties and a comb—items that the Commander had lent Dawn when she requested them—braiding the girl's hair, which had grown several inches past her shoulders during her time in captivity. "He's been so strange lately. I wouldn't dare say… friendly, but more considerate, you know?"

"Actually," Jupiter grunted, tugging on a particularly stubborn strand, causing Dawn to yelp, "I don't. Cyrus has always been the same unemotional, stoic man since the day he recruited me as a grunt. Of course, Team Galactic was small back then, but Cyrus has remained unchanged throughout the years." She sighed, completing one braid of Dawn's pigtails and turning to the other. "Then again, I've met his parents, and they aren't exactly the most generous folk. I doubt that he had a very loving childhood. Perhaps a life of no feeling is all he knows."

"How can parents not adore their children?" Dawn asked, appalled. "That is how you raise a baby, after all, by showering it with attention."

Jupiter blew out a sigh and brushed Dawn's hair once more. "They seem very strict," she observed, finishing Dawn's hairstyle. "And they were very curt and distant with Cyrus the day that I was acquainted with them. I believe he was subjected to so much expectation that he snapped and ran away from them, turning to a life of crime. He's antisocial, so I don't think he had many friends as a child; if any at all. I don't think his mother and father encouraged play. No one can tell a parent how to raise their offspring—they have to do it in their own way. Cyrus's parents did what they thought was right, and they paid the price for their mistake." She snapped a tie at the end of the braid and patted her on the back. "At any rate, don't worry about it, and most certainly don't bring it up to Cyrus. He'll have a Miltank. Now, he's waiting for you. Off we go."

As Dawn schlepped to his office, she couldn't help but to feel sorry for Cyrus. At least she had an inkling as to how his childhood was, but the imminent information depressed her deeply. No one—not even Cyrus himself—deserved to have a terrible family. While they were together, Dawn seriously thought of somehow trying to verbally connect with him—but when he was finished, Cyrus sent her away, hasty and troubled as usual. They hadn't truly spoken on an even level since the night he'd had a bad dream. And, as much as Dawn didn't want to admit it, she was glad that he'd visited. She was a little lonely; Jupiter couldn't be with her all the time, and even though Cyrus was not quite the company she'd enjoy or expect, he did come to see her somewhat amicably.

At least she knew that he did become overwhelmed.

At least she knew that he was _human._

()()()

Dawn wasn't sleeping when Cyrus came to her again. It was eleven o'clock at night and she was wide awake in her giant nightshirt and panties, snuggled under the covers and staring at the darkened wall that held all her drawings. They'd multiplied in the last week or so, and the formerly blank canvas was now filling rapidly with her musings. She hadn't dated a single picture, so she couldn't remember when she'd drawn most of them—or what had happened to her favorite, the sketch of her Piplup that she'd made the first day she spent with Cyrus. She missed her Piplup desperately. Although she'd tried to recreate the illustration in the days following, she hadn't been able to pinpoint the precise manner in which she'd drawn that one. Perhaps Cyrus's hunger had destroyed her in aesthetic ways as well as emotionally.

She sighed and sat up, unable to fall asleep. Why couldn't she get some rest? Maybe she just wasn't exhausted enough—Cyrus hadn't been violent today and seemed too distracted by work to keep her as long as he usually did. She hadn't done anything physically exhausting. She'd walked around the base twice and took a shower, but she'd been drawing the remainder of the time before lights out. Something was on her mind, and she couldn't put her finger on what. Lucas? No—she was scheduled to visit with him the next day, so she wasn't worried about his health or well-being. Her Pokemon? They were fine, she was sure. She knew that they wouldn't recognize her anymore, and this made her heart sink, but that wasn't the reason for her insomnia.

_Cyrus?_

No.

Abruptly, the door to her quarters slid open, letting in a pool of false light in from the hallway. Dawn blinked, the sudden assailing of electricity into her dark room startling her. She brought a hand up to her eyes to shield the brightness and tried to focus on the figure standing at the doorway. Jupiter? One of the guards, maybe?  
But when her eyes adjusted, she was a bit staggered to see Cyrus there—fully dressed in his Team Galactic attire, as he'd been the other night. His expression was unreadable, but Dawn did detect a note of surprise. "You aren't asleep," he said, stating a fact instead of asking a question.

"Yes," Dawn said, hurrying to gather her wits before they embarrassed her. What did he want again? Was the nightmare recurring? "I-I-I couldn't… fall asleep, so…" She swallowed. "A-another drea—"

"You need to sleep," Cyrus said softly but sternly. He walked over to her and threw the covers from her bed. "Come with me."

Instinctively, Dawn used her hands to cover her bare legs. "W-Why?" She stuttered. She had such a hard time talking coherently around him that it irritated her. "Is there an emergency? A break-in?"

"No," Cyrus said simply, not at all fazed by her modesty—something that had annoyed him continually before. "I merely have something to show you."

"Oh," Dawn said. What was that something? A gun? Her Pokemon? Lucas? _His…?_She blushed prudishly at her naughty thoughts. "May I ask what that is?"

For the smallest of moments, Dawn saw something dash by in Cyrus's eyes—something that looked vaguely like… amusement. "It's a surprise," he said. "Don't worry about putting on your skirt. Your shirt is long enough to conceal you. Most of the grunts are in bed by now, anyway. I assure you that you won't be seen." He dipped his head at her. "You'll like this, I promise."

Too afraid to defy him—yet still slightly intrigued by his proposition—Dawn slid out of bed. _Cyrus never promises anything._ "Okay," she remarked obediently. "I'll come with you." The second that her bare skin collided with the terrifically chilly room temperature of the Galactic base, Dawn convulsed with a vehement shudder. She continuously seemed to forget how freezing Cyrus liked to keep the place. _How does he stand it?_

Cyrus noticed her trembling and queried, "Are you cold, girl?" When Dawn nodded, she watched in wonderment as he unbuttoned his heavy shirt, removed it from his broad shoulders, and tucked it around her petite body. The garment wrapped all the way around her, encompassing her form like a fat blanket, and reached down past her knees. It was wide enough that it barely skirted her skin, leaving her to think that she could fit another person her size in here. Instantly, she was warmed by the fabric—not just her digits, but her heart as well, bowled that Cyrus had the humanity within him for such a gesture of goodwill. The shirt even smelled good, like cologne. She'd never noticed before that he wore any.

She pulled his top layer closer around her, swathing himself in his scent. She reassured herself that she was only cold—not that… not that she liked his stroke of kindness. "Thank you," she whispered. Within her, she mustered the strength to look into his eyes.

Cyrus's eyelids fluttered, and she saw—on him!—a tinge of pink color his cheeks. "L-Let's go," he managed, turning about, his back facing her as he exited her room. Dawn hurried after him, trying not to get too far behind. His strides were long and paced; her legs were shorter and therefore, it was tricky to try and keep up with him. After several minutes of Cyrus loping composedly ahead and Dawn scuffling behind about six feet, Cyrus stopped and turned to her. Dawn came to a halt, mimicking his actions.

"Arceus, you're slow," he grumbled, glaring at her. But Dawn immersed herself in the fact that his glower was not hostile—it was more chiding, playful scolding. _How odd,_she thought. Cyrus's famous fierce stares were almost always scornful. He took three strides, covering the carpeted gorge between them, and grabbed for her hand.

Dawn nearly jumped back with angst as he reached for her, but relaxed as his palm closed over hers. It was a direct duplicate of how Dawn had patted Cyrus's hand on the night of his painful throes, sprinkled with some possessiveness and care. When Dawn's gaze flickered up to the Galactic leader, she perceived the dusted blush from before. "Er, what are you doing?" She asked, a reasonable question, trying to suppress a flush of her own.

"You won't fall behind," he mumbled, luring her in to his side, "if I have a hold on you." He wasn't looking at her. "Come on, let's make haste."

Dawn wanted to say something to him, but she wasn't quite sure what it was as they walked, hand in hand.

Awkwardly, but together.

()()()

Cyrus brought Dawn to his office, and she was fascinated not to see any guards stationed outside the expansive doors that she had entered through countless times. The empty lobby was bizarre, as Dawn had never seen any fewer than ten grunts milling around before the headquarters of their leader. Even when Cyrus called for Dawn, there were still a good number of them. But now, there was not a soul in the corridor aside from the two of them. _Now that I think about it,_ Dawn realized swiftly, _there weren't any guards by my room when he came to get me, either._Had Cyrus dismissed them? What for?

Towing her along, Cyrus let go of her hand and pushed the entry open, grunting lightly as he did so, as the task was physically exerting. He brought Dawn inside and closed the egress after them, not locking it, as he usually did. Dawn was still in awe of Cyrus's massive office, regardless of the countless instances that she'd been here—the widescreen, wall-sized computers that lined his walls, the substantial desk in the middle that could be mistaken for a dining table, and the two-story windows that lent a naïve eye to the peaceful world that surrounding this base that roared its own tumult like a caged hurricane. Her sight went straight to those panes of glass—and to the field of stars that laid in the sky's black soil.

She was struck by their beauty. So many of them! Bright and dim, blue and white, organized in constellations and standing alone—some planets, some mere pricks of ancient light. She picked out a few common arrangements that she'd learned about in school: the Big Dipper (whose point at the North Star made her realize that Cyrus's office faced the north), the Scorpion, even the Seven Sisters, despite the gatherings' distances away from each other. It was as if every single star in the night sky was visible here. Cyrus had a live planetarium in his own office. Without thinking, Dawn began to laugh, the celestial bodies filling her with joy and hope. Clutching Cyrus's shirt, she ran up to the window and grinned, staring out at the natural splendor that was the sunless sky.

Cyrus appeared next to her. Beneath the jacket that he'd given Dawn, he was wearing a simple black and white undershirt that clung to his chest. "Breathtaking, isn't it?" He said.

"Yes," Dawn breathed. "Simply gorgeous. Is this what you wanted to show me?"

Cyrus nodded. "I've wondered for the last few days or so if I should fetch you, since the stars have been especially vibrant lately. My office is the best place indoors to admire a sight such as this. Often, when I can't sleep, I come here to see it. It's rather… cathartic."

The revelation hit Dawn abruptly and made her feel distinctly unusual—_Cyrus was sharing an intimate part of his life with her._He was such a private man, and yet here he was, telling her a detail about his existence that perhaps most of his underlings didn't know about. Because of their history, Dawn did not feel privileged—just weird. Honestly, she didn't know how to take this moment. She tried to appreciate it as best she could, but came off deeming the situation uncanny.

"I have always had an interest in space," Cyrus admitted. Dawn tuned in as intently as she could. "As a child, I was very… curious about it. I built robots that I attempted to shoot off into the atmosphere and daydreamed about becoming an astronaut. Of course, that was before… this happened." He gesticulated to his office, and Dawn knew he was referring to his goals and Team Galactic. "I am an ambitious man, and apparently, grazing the stars was not enough for me. I have an urge to control them—and, girl, I am not sure why. I want to touch them, but at the same time, I want to seize them and never let them go. One day, I worry that they will be gone—or that I will die before I understand them fully." Cyrus's face fell, and for the first time in the weeks that Dawn had known him, Cyrus was sad. "It seems that space is escaping my grasp… and that if I do not find Diagla or Palika in time, it will fade away, and I shall be left with nothing."

Dawn was stunned. This was the most Cyrus had spoken to her in one meeting. Perhaps his speech was more than he'd said to her in every one of their occurrences combined. She hadn't known that such a storm of conflict raged behind his seemingly evil desires to alter the world. What he wanted to do was indeed treacherous and threatening to the humans and the Pokemon… but, at the same time, she could not blame him for fearing that he would never attain his aims. She too felt insecure about becoming the best Pokemon trainer in Sinnoh alongside Lucas—Cyrus was the same, only his fear was on a much larger and more dangerous scale.

When the media hype and false public image of Cyrus was stripped, what was left behind was the shell of an introverted man, trying to find the light at the end of his tunnel. Maybe one day, he would see the error of his ways. Maybe he would find out on his own that destroying the planet was not the path to placating himself. Dawn could only hope that he changed his mind before it was too late so he wouldn't struggle and drown like every other boss of every other sinister organization that had plagued the Pokemon world. Team Rocket had failed. Team Magma and Aqua had failed. If Team Galactic failed, would Cyrus think that he had, too?

Would he continue to live his life thinking that he failed?

"I don't think so," Dawn said quietly. Cyrus looked at her in earnest, wanting to know what she had to say. "Space is… much stronger than you or I are. It can't be controlled, nor tamed. It can only be admired." She paused and fumbled for her next words. What could she say? His problems were deeper than she could fathom. Whatever she said would make no difference at all. "I suppose it means you appreciate beauty, and that's what's important. I think."

When Dawn turned her head to see his reaction to her bland opinion, she was amazed to see that he was beaming at her with pursed lips and shining eyes, as if he were touched to the crux of his empty—no, not empty, misunderstood—soul by her words. "Yes," he said, speaking with respect in his voice, like he'd suddenly understood something he'd been searching for the answer to for a long time. "Yes, I do. Thank you."

Before Dawn could ask what he was grateful to her for, she felt a pressure against her hand. Upon looking down, she saw that Cyrus had taken her hand in his again. Nervousness rose inside her, and she whipped her head back to the window, shaking in Cyrus's oversized shirt as she tried to concentrate on the stars. But her mind was attached to the fact that Cyrus was touching her in a way that was not only asexual, but affectionate. This night was so full of surprises and shocks that Dawn wasn't sure if she could take everything in at once.

"Girl," Cyrus said. Dawn still couldn't bring herself to look at him. "Look at me, please." What shook Dawn more than anything with that phrase was that it wasn't a blatant command, but instead a faint plea. She swallowed, sighed to satiate her qualms, and reluctantly turned to behold his expression, which had relaxed significantly since he'd picked her up at her quarters.

"That's a good girl," he murmured. Leaning down, he pressed the gentlest kiss on her earlobe. "It's getting late. I'll take you back to your room. You need your sleep."

Dawn was frozen. _That's the first time he's ever kissed me._Cyrus slipped his hand out of hers, and Dawn understood only then that she was shaking uncontrollably.

She did not know what was happening.

And the most frightening thing was that she didn't know if she disliked it.

()()()

That night was the first night in which Dawn did not dream of Lucas.


	17. Part 16

_Rob and Huey caught wind of what Lucas had done mere hours after the battering; after all, in a place like a prison, word travels fast, and no quicksilver or hearsay passed by the skilled ears of either men. Of course, being a rugged but amicable peacekeeper, Rob wanted to punish him. "Take away his cigarettes, maybe," Rob suggested to Huey when they convened alone in the dining room to privately discuss the uncontrollable youth that was under their wings. "When I was first starting out, if I didn't get a smoke every hour, I went nuts. That'll teach him to beat someone up without warning."_

_"Hey, maybe the guy came onto him, you know?" Huey said. "The asshole that he took the pipe to was a serious delinquent. He harassed Diamonds a few times in the showers. If I hadn't been there, I doubt there'd be the Diamonds we know today. Probably just a shell and not a human being."_

_"Or he didn't," Rob snorted, "and Lucas just beat the shit out of him because he's distraught over that girl in the overworld. He's crazy about her. I've never been in love like that before."_

_But Huey had—and he understood Lucas's plight intimately. He snapped his fingers and frowned at the former bird keeper. "Hey, pipe down, would ya?" He hissed. "There could be people eavesdropping outside. Remember the name rule?"_

_Rob rolled his eyes. "Yeah, yeah," he grumbled. "But we're responsible for the kid, and he's getting out of hand. The guards will be on our backs unless we do something about him. We need a measure of discipline."_

_Huey huffed. He loved Rob, but the man could be somewhat illogical. "Why don't you let me talk to him?" he said. "Slapping boys on the wrist stops working when they're sixteen, you know. They're more open to reason at that age. Girls, on the other hand, aren't, but Lucas is smart." He smirked internally. _Not shrewd, but at least smart.

_"But smart won't get him anywhere in jail," Rob said, "and he's conscious of that, which is why he's been bulking up lately. Yet what he did wasn't a wise choice of use for that muscle mass of his. The other inmates will either be petrified to approach him from now on or tear him into tiny pieces. Intimidating, he ain't."_

_Huey gave Rob a skeptical look. "My friend, if you think that the rest of the piss-dripping crustaceans in this ugly sea aren't scared of Diamonds, you're blind as a Zubat. They've always tried to keep more than a few hands between themselves and him, and it's not because of you or I. Sure, he might not be the most daunting guy down here, but he radiates power. Intelligence. Charm. And most of all, drive, which is what the shiftless asses down here lack. His overwhelming upper hand above them in just about everything frightens them." Huey's eyes glinted, somewhat triumphantly that he'd managed to encourage strength in Lucas. "They have been afraid of him since the day that he came here. After all, not everyone has the guts to storm Team Galactic so brazenly. In fact, I'll bet if we met the girl, she'd be treated with the same respect."_

_"What do you suggest we do?" Rob was tired of Huey's shenanigans. The eccentric sailor always found a way to dodge or elaborate upon questions asked to him. "We can't just pretend that this didn't happen."_

_"No," Huey said, grunting as he slapped his knee in an exaggerated motion of rising to his feet, "but you can listen to me once in a while. Didn't you hear what I said earlier? Give me some time with him. I'll talk to the kid. Set him straight."_

_The problem with Huey, Rob was aware, was that "set straight" to him never meant physical correction. "Oh?" The former birdsman scoffed. "And what will you talk to him about?"_

_Turning his fat, meaty neck toward Rob, he smirked so that a hint of his rows of yellowing, decomposing teeth glinted in the dim prison light, absorbed by the concrete walls and floor. "None of your business, Robin." He sauntered out of the dining room, his strides long and easy as he loped around a corner. Rob was left alone in the cafeteria, and with nothing else to do, he sat down at one of the long benches and thought._

_Huey had called him Robin._

_"Hey, Huey," he whispered, far from earshot of the departing man. "I thought you said no real names, you bastard."_

()()()

_For several days, Lucas had slept with the pipe—still flaking lead and colored gray, but now mottled with dried blood—beside him in bed. Lucas had learned to always be attentive in captivity, even in the midst of sleep. The pipe gave him a suitable form of weaponry, excellent for protecting himself and Dawn's honor. It was his symbol, immortalized after the attack and forever associated with him as he took his place among Galactic prison lore. It became his quiet lover, someone (or something?) that he could turn to when he felt his sanity was once more escaping his grasp. No longer could he hold onto the memories of Dawn as means of placating himself—whenever he thought of her, he only pictured a harsh, gory face, twisted with the sin of sex and the absence of redemption. All he wanted to do now was sleep, as he was attempting to do right now, atop his bunk_  
_with one arm over his face._

_Yet even sleep was not solace, for when Lucas dreamed at night, the shoreline of Sinnoh still came to him. But Dawn was not there anymore._

Maybe I am going crazy.

_"Hey, kiddo." A voice boomed from the entrance of the cell, wide open as protocol dictated that it was supposed to be during the day. Lucas wasn't sure what time it was—midafternoon, maybe? He hadn't even stepped out on the outdoor quad for a cigarette—but despite that, he was still shaken from his distressed trance in a manner that was not pleasant. Instinctively, he reached for his pipe and leaped off his bunk, ready to face his attacker, only to notice when he planted his feet on the ground that Huey was staring at him frowningly. The animal rage within Lucas died down and flickered away like a burnt candle. He was just trying to harm one of his only friends in this hole. How ill was he becoming? How sick was the notion of Dawn with another man making him?_

_Huey raised his hands, revealing a gritty nest of underarm hair. "Whoa, now, Diamonds," he said. "I'm no creep. Put that stupid-ass thing down."_

_Lucas lowered his pipe. "I'm sorry," he murmured. "I thought that…"_

_"Don't think, kid," Huey told him. "Thinking is stupid. Don't act, either. You defied that rule a few days ago, and neither Rob nor I are pleased with you about that."_

_"H-He was—"_

_"No, no," Huey reprimanded gently. "I don't need an explanation. I know exactly what happened. He said a few bad things about you and your girl, so you came down on him like a ton of bricks. I know that feeling. You don't think I've done it myself a time or two?"_  
_A transitory image of Huey's fiancée passed by in Lucas's mind. "He spoke lies about Dawn," Lucas said, his voice cracking. His biceps drooped, mimicking his sadness as his shoulders slumped. The head of the pipe that boasted the steam valve clunked against the concrete floor. "And… I couldn't get him to shut up." Lucas bowed his head. He loved and respected the men that he shared this cell with. Disappointing them made him feel guilty for the first time in two months._

_Huey was silent for a beat or two of an imaginary metronome before Lucas heard his heavy feet shuffle over to Rob's own bunk. When Lucas glanced over, he saw that Huey had sat down and was patting the empty space beside him on the stained, off-white sheets. "Get over here, you," he commanded, "so we can get some things clear."_

_Disinclined, Lucas went over to the bed anyway and sat down beside Huey, propping his pipe against the rusted ladder. The steam valve, which was so coated in caked blood that the glass display was no longer visible, caught on the second rung and helped the weapon stand perfectly. Huey gave a faint but disdainful look to the lead pipe before shifting his gaze back to Lucas. "So tell me what's wrong," Huey said. "I know that your wrath only had about half to do with Assface's sassy remarks. There's something simmering in your brain, and if you don't get it out now, you'll kill everybody and then yourself in a fleeting moment of insanity. I've seen it happen before in this particular jail too many times. Spill the beans, kiddo."_

_Lucas hesitated. He knew that out of every man in the prison that Huey would understand his plight the best, but was he really willing to share something so secretive? He trusted Huey with his life, and he was aware that Huey would never betray that trust. But still—what if he did? This was confinement, after all—the world down here was dog-eat-dog, much more dangerous than the surface above where Dawn lived._

… Dammit, I just had to think about her.

_"It's about Dawn," Lucas said shortly, "and Cyrus."_

_Huey's countenance twitched in confusion. "All right," he said. "What about your chick and the big man?"_

_"He's… using her," Lucas continued. This was so incredibly hard for him to say. He tried to spit out the words, but they lodged in his throat, choking him with the strength of a pair of invisible, malicious hands. "F-F-F-For… um…"_

_"Sex," Huey finished. Lucas blew out a breath and nodded twice rapidly. His veins quirked and jumped at that horrible word being used to describe the two of them. How could Huey have such ease saying that? It bothered Lucas, but not enough to lash out. He needed to control his urge to kill. It was not a normal urge—a primal one, perhaps, but not one of the modern evolved man. He was turning into an animal, and that was what scared him the most._

_"Yes," Lucas said. "And I'm afraid that… if she does it with him long enough that she'll forget about me down here, and keep being with him, and then I'll grow old and die and…" His voice trailed off. When it reemerged, it was meek and small, a mousy intonation. "I'll never see her again."_

_"And what," Huey said, "makes you think that she would desert you like that?"_

_"Because she's never told me that she loves me," Lucas confessed. "Beyond a friend, anyway. She's… she's free to love other men. She'll pick someone else, and that most likely will be Cyrus. We've been together for every day of our lives, and she—" Pause. "… She still pushes me away." Lucas felt tears spring up in his eyes, and it hit him how weak he had become. The muscle, the beatings, the yelling at the top of his lungs, the false confidence—was that all an illusion? He was fragile when he came here, but had this stint only drove him deeper into cowardice?_

_Was that why Dawn rejected him?_

_Because he was weaker than Cyrus?_

_Because he wasn't a man?_

_Lucas couldn't hold it back anymore—he began to cry. Tears streamed down his cheeks, veritable rivers of sorrow and denial, spilling and pooling to the edge of his jaw and dripping on the grainy floor in mournful puddles. The soft sniffles and sobs that he made served as a melody for the salty tears dancing with the grime below. Huey placed a comforting hand on Lucas's shoulder, waiting until his well ran dry, watching the rainbow tin on the ponds of liquid agony from the reflection of the dim lights above._

_When Lucas's weeping became quiet heaves, Huey started to talk. "How do you know that she doesn't like it?" He said carefully. "Maybe she's doing it for your own good?" When Lucas didn't respond, Huey struggled to reach inside him to pull up the memories he'd shoved behind a hundred walls. "Like my girl did."_

_Immediately, at the mention of Huey's late girlfriend, Lucas's head snapped up._

_"She was so beautiful," Huey began, his voice cracking slightly, but he trudged on like a soldier into the front lines. "Hair that went all the way down to her tight, sexy ass, curves that you could drive a car around, and the loveliest smile. Really, men dropped to their knees and proposed to her when she flipped her hair and flashed them a grin. And she chose me, of all people. Tiny, chubby, ignorant me. She could've dated a male model or an actor or a millionaire, but instead, she fell in love with me. Every day, when I wasn't on the water and I woke up next to her, I thanked Arceus for giving her to me." He smiled. "I was a little like you, kid. I had this gorgeous woman that loved me with all her heart and I was plain as dog shit. Something bad's bound to come out of that, right?"_

_She sounds so much like Dawn,Lucas realized. Where were Huey's demons—and why did he hide them so deeply?_

_"But, of course, with a girl that wonderful comes enemies that coveted her," Huey went on. "Everywhere I went with her, there were always other men that wanted her. And, of course, they tried to sabotage me. I managed to fend them off, but even my chunky strength can only go so far. There was one man that I couldn't overcome." Huey removed his hand from Lucas's arm and folded that one with the other in his lap, staring down at them. "That man was my boss. Big, mean, ugly guy who owned the ship I was stationed on. I wasn't a militarized sailor, so I could pick whomever I wanted to sail with. My choice of a captain wasn't a bright one, though. He was a notorious womanizer, and when he set his eyes on mine one day, he decided that he was going to have her."_

_Lucas's heart sank for Huey, but he still said nothing. He was too afraid that if he disrupted this tale, Huey would shatter._

_"I… An assignment was given to me," Huey said, "five months into my relationship girl and seven months after I'd been hired by the captain to work on his ship. I was going to posted on board for a cargo shipping to Kanto for six months. I didn't want to be away from my girlfriend, so I requested that she come with me on the voyage. My boss… he accepted, and we were quartered together." Huey swallowed and let out a shuddering breath. "One night, I was chosen for evening sentry… the waters were full of domestic pirates back then, and you couldn't afford to be too careful. I left my girlfriend asleep in the cabin to pace the decks—or so I thought."_

_"What happened?" Lucas asked._

_"The captain's cabin was fairly close to the starboard bow," Huey said. "My prescribed route went past there—night sentries all have to follow the same direction, which I thought was kind of stupid since you could always hear him having sex with ladies he'd picked up at port during the day, but at the same time, I wanted to keep my job, so I went. I gritted my teeth as I walked by—and sure enough, there were noises coming from the cabin that sounded much like screwing. Curious, I stopped to listen in on the female voice to see if I recognized it—and I did."_

_"It was your girlfriend, wasn't it?" Lucas inquired._

_Huey bit his lip. "Yeah," he mumbled. "I burst into the cabin, and sure enough, they were naked and tangled in the sheets of his bed together. The captain started screaming at him, so I cussed him out and pulled my girl out onto the deck. She was wrapped in the comforter, holding it around her ample breasts. I remember how pissed she looked, her face lit by the full moon's light in the starless sky. She tried to explain herself, but I was too busy screaming at her to take in a word she was saying. We stood there by the railing, arguing vociferously to the point where we woke some of the other sailors and they gathered around to watch the show._

_"Suddenly, the boat—I can't recall who was at the steering wheel that night, probably the captain's incompetent navigator or someone—lurched forward, and we both stumbled. But while I managed to regain my footing quickly, my girlfriend was a novice and didn't quite have her sea legs yet. She teetered to the side and fell over the safety bars on the side, plummeting into the black ocean below._

_"Instantly, I was on alert—and so were the other guys watching. I shouted for a life ring, which was fetched straightaway, but she couldn't get a hold onto it in time because her limbs were tangled in that heavy blanket that was wrapped around her. The water soaked into it within seconds and weighed her body down. She writhed in that death trap, trying to free herself, but she was unable. Eventually, she became exhausted, and she sank. She disappeared beneath the surface of the licking waves—and I watched her drown." Huey fell over his words, his tongue tied with grief. "I watched the love of my life die, Diamonds. There was no struggle as the water filled her nose and her body, and the darkness swallowed her whole and refused to spit her back out to me. She died peacefully once she could fight no more. It broke my heart forever."_

_Lucas was wan with sympathy. He couldn't even imagine how conflicted Huey felt, catching her in the act of cheating and then, moments later, renouncing his anger as she met her fate with the murky depths of saltwater. That was the ultimate punishment, the most devastating sadness. Lucas knew that he'd never be able to fathom Huey's regrets and self-loathing. Taking one look at Huey's pallid face as he recalled the most decisive moment of his life, Lucas wanted to hate himself for thinking that he was worse off than this man._

_"They brought the boat back to dry land the next morning," Huey said. "I couldn't sleep. I just stood on the deck where I'd been where she died for five hours, shaking and my mouth agape. The other sailors stood next to me, keeping vigil, telling me they were sorry, but their words were hollow and empty. They didn't understand. Nobody did. I was alone in the world again—the seven months I'd spent with her suddenly felt like a dream._

_"When we disembarked in Lilycove in Hoenn—about a third of the way to our destination—I was arrested. Apparently, the captain had patched in a radio call to authorities on land that I'd killed a woman in their waters. Killed her!" Huey slammed his fist down on his thigh. "That bastard lied to them! He said I'd murdered her, that sick son of a bitch. They kept me in prison there and finally put me on trial three weeks later, but my fellow men—bless their souls—testified that it had been a malfunction in the boat that had caused her to fall, not me pushing her over. The jury ruled in my favor, and I was let off. But the captain had already fired me, so I was out of a job. I hopped on a steamship on its way back to Johto, and I made it home without trouble. My girl's funeral had been long over by then, and her parents refused to allow me to see them or attend her grave. It… hurt. It hurt so much, to suddenly lose everything like that._

_"About a month before Team Galactic caught up with me, I received a letter from my best mate who was serving aboard the ship with me the time my girlfriend drowned. He said that he was sorry he hadn't told me earlier, but I'd been in prison and had been barred from getting mail. A few days before I caught her in bed with the captain, my friend had overheard a conversation between the two of them next to my cabin while I was cleaning the belly below the floorboards."_

_Huey stopped. He had to regain himself before delivering the end to his story. "He said… that he threatened to fire me if she didn't sleep with him just once. You think the economy's bad now; it was practically impossible for an unskilled guy like me to find a job back in those days. She knew that, so she complied. She was protecting me the entire time." Huey glanced at Lucas, and Lucas saw that his eyes glistened with unshed tears. "It was then that I realized that maybe if I'd just listened, she wouldn't have died. After reading his letter, I wished that the court would have convicted me, so I could have died alone, like I deserved."_

_A silence spread over Lucas and Huey as the tale concluded, as neither felt that it was appropriate to speak. As he had done with him, Lucas allowed Huey to cry lowly, not judging him for his pain. His problems with Dawn were nothing compared to the dark spirits that followed Huey night and day. How had he concealed them so well? An untrained eye would peg Huey as jovial, happy-go-lucky, as he'd never experienced a day of hardship in his entire life._

_"Moral of the story, kid, is to never assume things," Huey whispered. "Your girl—she loves you. I know she does. Just give her time. She knows what she's doing, I'm sure, if you two were able to penetrate Team Galactic's line of defense so well. If she is looking after you from her compromised position, she loves you." Huey curled his lip and nodded confidently. "Like a man and not a best friend. I can promise you that."_

_There was no longer any doubt in Lucas's heart that Huey was right._

_"Huey," he said. "Thank you."_

_"No, Diamonds," Huey said with a crooked smile. "Thank you. I needed to get that off my chest. I've never told anyone until now."_

_"I'm supposed to go see Dawn within the next few days," Lucas said. "What do I do?"_

_"You tell her you love her," Huey said. "Tell her twice. Three times. Whatever it takes."_

_"For what?"_

_"For her to look at you and say…" Huey halted. "… 'I love you, too, Lucas.'"_

_Lucas beamed as he wrapped his arms around Huey and gave him the closest, strongest hug that he'd ever given anyone other than Dawn._

_"Hey, stop," Huey said, though he embraced the boy back. "This is gay."_

_"So is the real name thing," Lucas observed._

_Huey smirked. "That is it, Diamonds. That it is."_


	18. Part 17

**WARNING: There is erm... smut in this chapter, so you may skip the latter half after the second ()()() if you're not into that. **

**Thanks for the reviews and the continued support! You readers encourage me to continue. I hope to keep seeing feedback from you guys!**

**-Silent-Protagonist**

()()()

_If there was one security in Cyrus's bleak, vapid world, it was that he was going completely out of his mind._

_He hadn't slept for days following the incident with him and the girl in his office. What had he been thinking, dragging her out of bed and giving her insight into such a personal aspect of his life? She was on the outside of his impenetrable shell, and now that he'd allowed her to look in, he was embittered to the fear that he might crack. He had spent years erecting his barrier to outside interference—years upon years, locking away his emotions into a chest deep within his psyche and barricading those who tried to be his "friend" from touching his heart. Cyrus Akagi needed no human contact beyond that of business. Yes, the girl was necessary in satiating his basic, primordial need for sex, but she was the sole exception to his case. No one—not Jupiter nor Saturn, not Mars nor Charon—knew the man that was sequestered in his dark, soulless heart. His parents had denied him a healthy childhood, so he chose to starve those around him to individuality._

_Then what was this? This emotion_-emotion!_-that swallowed him whole and shook him to the core? Two months with the girl, and he had been able to stave off any serious attachment to her._

_Until now._

_Now, whenever Cyrus even made the slight mistake of meeting eyes with her, he fell into a rapture that he could not claw his way out of. A spark ignited him, burning through his veins and lighting his skin in an invisible fire that made him want to grab her and feel his sweltering woe. He'd once wanted to control her, tie chains around her and suffocate the happiness that seemed to radiate off her like an intoxicating perfume. Perhaps he had done somewhat of a proficient job at that, for the girl was not quite as buoyant as she once was. In the close past, he desired her as yet another slave to his ambition, as he did with Diagla and Palika and the mysterious shadow Pokemon that he was unable to study without admiring its hell-given strength._

_But why was it that everything was changing, before his very eyes? Suddenly, he didn't want to oppress her—Cyrus genuinely craved her company. He tried desperately to infuse the girl's smell with his, imprint it on his brain so when she was away from him, he wouldn't forget about her. Instead of ordering her to perform to his liking, Cyrus wanted to curl up into her and have her hold him, to kiss him and touch his hair. He wished for his pleasure to become hers so that they could share intimacy together in lieu of the one-sided torture that the Galactic leader subject the girl to._

_What was her name?_

Dawn.

_What a beautiful name for such an ugly force, he thought. This girl that was endeavoring—without her knowledge—to make him succumb to this horror that imperfect humans called "love." It was as if she symbolized the genesis of his downfall simply by the name she had been born with. Is this what others… felt, Arceus forbid, when they came to love? Why, then, had so many told him that love was an elegant, flawless dance? He felt—_felt! Why do I feel?_—no pleasure or prospects, but bottomless agony. He had been lied to, as he had been betrayed before by the gossip of emotional, defective people. Cyrus swore that he was being torn apart limb by limb, slowly, as if the Gods aspired to watch him scream obscenities as he bled out the emotions that he had hidden inside him for so long._

_He imagined the girl watching the scene by the side of the boy—that boy that Cyrus so foolishly allowed her to correspond with. Cyrus knew that she was in love with him, and he with her. They could not have been any more palpable on the day that they were captured. At first, he'd overlook it, assuming that their frivolous attraction would cause no problems under the proper supervision. But in the present, Cyrus wanted to snap the boy's neck. That young man stood in his way of the girl that beguiled him so. He would have to discontinue their visits for his peace of mind._

_With a stroke of frustration, Cyrus realized that he was jealous. Damn! If that girl did not exist, he would not feel this way. No, he would not feel at all. He needed her dead. In the morning, he would order her execution. It was the only way._

_But deep down, he knew that he would keep her alive and close to him. Love was an emotion. How had he become so flawed? How could he feel something he had never been shown?_

_"I'm not perfect. Nobody is. You don't have to strive to be."_

I am not in control.

I have never been in control, have I?

()()()

_Cyrus's room was nothing remarkable or lavish—due to the fact that he spent more time in his office than asleep in his bed, did not spruce the place with flippant trimmings such as paintings or decorations. He had a walk-in wardrobe that housed multiple copies of his same uniform (for other than a few solid-color grey shirts and a sole pair of jeans that he hadn't worn in two years, Cyrus's sense of fashion was limited), the unembellished king-sized bed at the back of the room that he'd had his nightmares in, and two simple white lounge chairs with a coffee table between them. It sat atop a Persian rug that was weaved intricately and artfully, telling the story of Giratina. Cyrus had found it in an outdoor market in Veilstone City, where Team Galactic was stationed in the past and grew rather fond to the block-like designs and minimal use of color, as if it were an ancient plaiting pattern instead of the overtly bold shapes that were employed on modern rugs._

_That little place with the runner and the chairs was meant for private meetings between him and one other person—but to be frank, he never remembered using it._

_Cyrus stared at his downtrodden reflection in the full-body mirror that on the inside door of his closet as he mulled over his predicament. He was dully amazed at how exhausted and defeated he looked—black circles beneath his eyes, insipid from the lack of sleep and food. Even his stature slouched, which struck a chord deep within him. Cyrus was a man that took pride (pride, he believed, was an admissible emotion) in his tall height and always walked with his head high. But now, Cyrus could not gather the strength that had once flowed within him so freely to eve stand up straight._

_He was right—emotions made one weak._

_Yet no matter how hard he tried, he wasn't able to banish the one that dominated him._  
_Nervously, Cyrus glanced at his wristwatch. Where was she? He'd ordered for one of his guards to fetch the girl over ten minutes ago. Surely it didn't take that long. When he put Jupiter in charge of collecting her, it never did… curse him and his sudden handicap! Why had he not thought of calling Jupiter in the first place? He knew why—simply because he was not thinking right now. The girl was slated to meet with the boy again today._

_Cyrus had to see her before then._

_He had to. There was no question now that he needed her._

_Absently, Cyrus stuffed his hands in his pocket—and felt a strange sensation prickle his fingertips. The feeling was coarse, almost like cheap paper, and mysterious conglomeration of lace. What was this? Had he not washed this particular pair of pants in some time and didn't empty_ _their contents? Curious, Cyrus pulled out the unknown bundle and unfolded it in his hands._

_It was the panties he'd torn from the girl the first day they'd "known" each other—and the very poor drawing of the Piplup, both articles that Cyrus believed he'd lost weeks earlier. Two months ago, Cyrus did not take much notice of the ripped underwear that he'd so salaciously concealed, but he found himself examining them closely this time. They were lime green, which Cyrus decided was an amusing color to wear underneath a skirt, and bore two tiny black bows on either end of the elastic band around the top. Frowning, the Galactic leader shoved those back from whence they came—into the deep recesses of his right pocket. Perhaps she was more of a slut than he thought._

_What was left in his broad palm was the Piplup sketch, still as ugly and amateur as the day he'd stolen it. He stifled a snort, gazing upon the creature that the girl's pencil had illustrated. It was indeed terrible. There was no question that art galleries would find her skill laughable and ridicule the oddity that was this "art." But Cyrus discovered a certain sentimentality attached to it, a talisman that followed the scribble around. When Cyrus laid one finger on the beak of the flat Piplup, the girl's loneliness poured from the paper into his body and made him completely tangible to the sadness she must have been feeling that day._

_Feeling, he thought with disgust. Feeling._

_He turned to the blank corkboard that was in the free space beside the mirror on the inside of his white wooden closet door, honing in on several thumbtacks that were pinned into the practical material. Upon receiving memos that required attention within a day or so, Cyrus often pinned them there to remind him when he got up to get dressed in the morning. Lately, however, everything had been dreadfully urgent—or not necessary at all, so his energy was channeled away from the corkboard to his office. Thus, it was unoccupied. No papers had been there for a long while. Placing the drawing so that the corners evenly lined with the edges of the board, Cyrus tacked it up with four pins, one for each angle on the perfect square. When he was finished, Cyrus stepped back to study his handiwork._

_For a moment, he felt stupid._

_Suddenly, the entrance to his room groaned open noisily, and Cyrus shuddered. _Damn, when was the last time the grunts oiled the hinges in this place? _He heard a soft, reticent shuffling of footsteps, and he assumed this to be the girl. Before she could cross his threshold entirely, Cyrus swiftly closed the door to his closet to disallow her to see what he had been doing. If she saw, she'd probably want the Piplup picture back—but the Galactic leader was outlandishly possessive for a reason that was unbeknownst to him. But what, recently, was making any sense?_

_He spun around, his speed visibly startling the girl, who stood in the small enclave created by the Giratina rug with her hands clasped below her chin. The girl's hair was done in two pigtail braids that hung before her collarbone—the innocence of the hairstyle occurred to him, and he found that he liked it. To his approval, she was wearing the turtleneck and skirt he'd picked for her; however, he saw with dismay that her feet were nude aside from a pair of black kneesocks. Her notable pink rain boots were nowhere to be found. At first, he thought that she'd adhered to common courtesy and removed her shoes at the door, but a quick glance revealed none._

_Immediately, Cyrus pointed to her legs. "Where are your shoes?" He asked, albeit being across the room from her._

_The girl jumped, as if she wasn't expecting the Galactic leader to address her. "J-Jupiter took them to be shined earlier this afternoon," she explained. "You called for me before I could get them back. I'm s-sorry, does it bother you?"_

_Cyrus sighed and shook his head. His base was impeccably clean, from the ceiling to the carpeted floor below. The chance that she'd picked up any diseases or dirt coming here was nil. Cyrus brought a hand up to his face and grabbed his temple, squeezing to dispel himself of the throbbing that had masqueraded itself as a sudden headache. "Sit down," he instructed, gesturing to the chairs upon the stylish runner._

_Subservient but nervous, the girl did as he asked and settled herself in the chair facing Cyrus's bed. She sank into the large piece of furniture, ingested by its mass. Surprisingly, she giggled as the cloth closed in around her before wiggling herself free and perching on the edge of the seat._

_The entire scene perplexed Cyrus, so he was inclined to ask. "What?" He demanded._

_"Nothing," the girl said, still smiling from her covert entertainment. "These chairs are so big and comfortable. I'd sit in them all day if I could."_

_Confused, Cyrus scowled an inborn scowl and made his way over to the vacant chair, sitting down. He was much larger than the girl and was thus not gobbled up by it, but she was correct in that the chair was yielding and snug. Leaning back against the chair, he blew out a sigh and momentarily closed his eyes. If the girl was not present, he could easily fall asleep on this._

_But if the girl was gone, he'd not feel a stroke of such desire._

_When he opened one eye, he saw the girl staring at him intently. "What do you require of me?" She asked. In her heart, Cyrus knew that she was alert to the notion that Cyrus did not need her for their usual, prescribed activity. The girl was astute beneath her airhead exterior—very little managed to get by her, contrary to what Cyrus judged initially. Her wide black eyes were always darting about, assessing her surroundings and greedily taking in information like a handsome little sponge. She pretended to act distracted, when in fact she was processing what to say next and routes of potential escape. The girl had always done that early on in Cyrus's office—he was rarely able to meet her eyes after their first few "appointments," for she was too busy keeping her mind off her task._

_Now, however, the girl was focused on him. Her attention was bestowed upon him completely—her eyes did not deviate as they normally did. She waited for a reaction from him as she leaned over the coffee table, her arms crossed over her stomach. Genuinely, she wished to make eye contact with his powder blue irises, delve into him. Perhaps Cyrus was not the only one affected by the other night as they stargazed in very close immediacy. Cyrus's palm was ablaze in remembrance of her hand's heat in his, threatening to burn off his arm._  
_She continued to confound him and drag him deeper into her emotional pool, drowning him as she went._

_And Cyrus_ wanted _that._

_Cyrus opened both eyes and bent forward so close to her above the table that the tip of his nose brushed hers. The unanticipated contact made the girl draw back slightly, her expression becoming a mix of concern and bewilderment. "That night in my office," he whispered lowly, as if there were others present in the room, "when I kissed you on the ear, did you like that?"_

_The girl opened her mouth, her midnight eyes broad in shock—taken aback that he'd even chosen to recall such an event. A noise came out from the base of her throat, but she could not formulate words as a pink blush covered her blanched face. The question was one of simple "yes" or "no," and yet she was incapable of answering even that. Still, Cyrus was not maddened at her struggle—he himself was unconvinced that he knew his own reply. If he said "yes," he would be betraying his quest to destroy the weakness that was emotion._

_Yet a "no" would be a lie._

_"W-Why do you ask?" The girl stumbled over the hurdles that were her words._

_"Because," Cyrus said, "I'm curious. Even a man with no emotions can afford to be curious."_

_The girl exhaled a shuddering breath and bit her lip. "Cyrus, I…" Her voice trailed off into nothingness._

_They sat in silence for only beat—so fast that it seemed skipped—before Cyrus reached over and tugged at one of the girl's flawless braids, no doubt products of Jupiter's creation. He did not pull hard enough to cause pain, but firmly so that the girl was nudged into awareness. "These… please me," he told her. "Continue to wear your hair in this fashion when I request it."_

_"Yes," the girl agreed._

_With one sharp pull on her hair—causing the girl to squeal in a daze—and before he knew what he was doing, Cyrus drew the girl close enough for his lips to rest on the same ear as before. The girl, practically sprawled across the coffee table now, gasped and tried to squirm, but Cyrus held her close to him with his iron grip, leaving no room for even a breath of air. He kissed the delicate shell once, twice, before taking in the soft lobe in his mouth and biting down gently._

_The girl went still, her body tense and shaking. She whimpered sensitively as Cyrus touched his mouth to the end of her jaw below the blessed ear, leaving a trail of saliva behind him. The noise stirred something in Cyrus's belly that was not physical arousal nor rote stimulation—it was the yearning grip to make her feel passion as he did. The craving scorched him like ice, covering his body with a cold chill that only encouraged his rash action. It was as if another man had possessed his form, acting out on whims that were not of his custody—the boy's, perchance._

_Without delay, Cyrus shot down that fleeting deliberation. If he could no longer take precedence over his own deeds, then he was an ever bigger fool than he was becoming._

_"Do you trust me?" Cyrus asked, drawing away._

_"N-No," the girl murmured. Her skin quaked beneath his touch._

_"Good," Cyrus said, "because I don't, either."_

_Grabbing her beneath the arms, Cyrus effortlessly lifted her up above the coffee table and onto his lap to straddle him, amazed at her light weight. She yelped in surprise, but once she was readjusted, the girl seemed to relax even in the slightest. From her position above the Galactic leader, she stared down at him, trying to determine what he was about to do—which was impossible when not even Cyrus had insight into his motives._

_Sliding a hand up the girl's shirt tentatively, Cyrus moved over the flat plane that was her abdomen before reaching her clothed breasts. The girl became taut in anticipation and edginess, but still lifted her arms so that he could remove her turtleneck. Her braids nearly caught on the high neck of the fabric, but the clothing was easily discarded upon the arm of the chair._

_The girl now sat upon Cyrus in nothing but her white cotton bra, her skirt, and shoeless socks. When Cyrus reached back to undo the snaps of the bra, the girl turned a profound crimson flush that extended even to the apples of her cheeks._

_"I will do nothing to hurt you," Cyrus murmured. "You have my word." He placed one kiss in the depression at the base of her collarbone as he stealthily unclasped the back and slipped the padded cloth away from her skin. The bra fell between their torsos, brushing the girl's naked one as opposed to the clad chest of Cyrus. Subtly, he heard the girl moan as he did so—although he did not know if she did so only out of obsequiousness._

_Cyrus pushed the girl back to take a good look at her, an exaggerated motion that made the girl swoon in red-faced embarrassment as she made a great effort to try and cover them. They were small but pert, rounded mounds of flesh on an otherwise thin and shapeless surface. He'd not yet seen them—and their appearance made Cyrus smolder with desire._

_Tucking his face directly above them, the man covered her with light kisses and, upon reaching her breasts, suckled at them, flicking their curves beneath his tongue. It was now that Cyrus began to elicit a true response from the girl, as she gasped and convulsed at the wet sensation. Her hands came to his shoulders, clutching his shirt as she fought desperately between seduction and hatred. "Nnn," she panted, her figure bucking forward to meet his mouth in an inherent, unrestrained need for the stimulation._

_As he did this, Cyrus's hand wandered—again, almost of its own free will—to the waist of the girl's skirt, his fingers dipping under the little space that was left between her sex and him. He began to rub her outside her panties, and the girl cried out in shock. She was extremely wet—so soon, too. Was that merely her body's innate response to what he was doing, or did she truly enjoy this? He looked up at her glazed expression and her heaving chest, groaning through the knuckle that she was biting to prevent herself from becoming too vocal and convinced himself that she was trying to resist to the best of her ability._

_Unfortunately for both of them, she was not rejecting him well enough._

_Cyrus could not stop himself. Blindly, he picked her up again and laid her lengthwise across the coffee table and knelt before her and unzipped the side of her skirt, sliding it down her supple, smooth legs. With it, he snagged the band of her underwear and removed the sopping pair as well, shedding them beside the stubby column that supported the table. Here she was, naked, glistening and shaking with conflict of odium and arousal before him. Cyrus was a logical man—he should have known better. Emotion was for the weak, the soulful; of which he was neither._

_But the girl said he appreciated beauty. Admiration was not a feeling._

Was it?

_Cyrus crouched, drawn to the provoked musk that she gave off, placing both hands on either end of her slender hips. He spread his tongue over her, tasting her sweet wetness and folding the juices between his teeth and lips. Her sex contracted beneath his mouth and the girl released a loud shriek, though not in displeasure. "Cyrus!" she cried, her hips buckling as she moaned and whimpered with the release that was coming all too straightforwardly. Cyrus took this as persuasion to continue, so he did, lapping at her thirstily as she grew more moist. The girl's breath quickened and her moans became higher-pitched as he increased his pace, sobs of his name combined with pleas for him to stop heightening his eagerness._

_When he inserted one finger inside of her, the girl plummeted over the edge. Cyrus felt her tighten around his digit and he watched as her abdomen seized, shaken dreadfully by an orgasm that he knew she wished she wasn't having. She yelled out his name one last time, her eyes shut and a shudder of reprieve quavering her as she fell into post-orgasmic exhaustion, the exertion and pressure having tired her. Cyrus moved his head out from between her legs to see her dreamy black eyes half-lidded. Indeed, though he throbbed with the ache of needing his own release, he found his vision too becoming bleary, as he had not slept fully well in days._

_"Cyrus," the girl mumbled sleepily, staring at him with an atmosphere around her that was coital, yet unreadable otherwise. "Why…?"_

_Cyrus did not know. For once, had no answers for her, this girl who asked too many questions. He hoisted her from her awkward position on the coffee table and carried her over to his bed, lying her down gently on the pillows—and when he freed her from his hold, he saw that she was already asleep. Inebriated by the swiftness of the last few minutes' events and by his fatigue, Cyrus crawled onto the space beside her and laid his head on his mattress, slumber already overtaking his will._

_He dreamed not nightmares. Instead, there was darkness, but his soulless soul knew only one troubled sentiment in such a picture:_

_He did not regret what he had done._


	19. Part 18

**Quick A/N: I received an anonymous review from an extremely helpful reader who asked me to address a topic I realize I haven't covered yet (and we're eighteen chapters in ;_; this is the faux pas of the writer): How is Dawn not pregnant yet? Is there birth control or condoms involved?**

**Yes, she is taking birth control by orders from the ubiquitous Cyrus, but I haven't included a scene with them yet, which makes me feel abundantly stupid. In this chapter, the birth control is mentioned in detail. Dawn becoming pregnant is NOT part of the plot. Initially, I was thinking of that happening (which might be why I didn't think to include the birth control), but no longer. **

**Oh yeah, one more thing: I project about six or seven chapters until the end of this story, including the epilogue. Perhaps a bit more if I deem it necessary.**

**Thank you for your continuing support, and a fave and feedback is always appreciated!**

**-Silent-Protagonist**

()()()

Dawn hadn't dreamed of the people in her surroundings for a long time—in fact, she hadn't dreamed at all since she'd been captured, and these tumultuous throes catapulted her into the troubled world of sleep for once. Too much had the dusk behind her lidded eyes been riddled with anxiety and depression, exacerbated by the dull, voiceless whispers that accompanied the swirling shadows. She'd never had a peaceful sleep until now.

And even this sleep did not allow her serenity.

She suspected that if she absolutely had to dream, she would have envisioned Lucas or a happy memory involving him; maybe of Twinleaf, playing in the schoolyard as a girl with Barry or receiving her Piplup. Dawn would have even accepted one of Jupiter, as there was nothing but comfort in associating with her. In no way did she think that her mind would be so traitorous as to have her dream of her captivity or her suffering friend or the loss of her beloved Pokemon.

Or Cyrus.

Because this day, she dreamt of Cyrus.

At least she thought that the persona that came to her was Cyrus—for he arrived in the guise of a small child, perhaps no more than six or seven. He was dressed in a pair of khaki pants and a solid brown shirt, strap-on sandals with patterns of stars and planets around his feet. Unlike the present-day Cyrus, this one was not as hard-faced and solemn—the familiar powder blue orbs shone with interest and thirst for knowledge. His hair was still light and cropped short, but it resembled more of a blonde tinge than the stark white of his adult life. No cheekbones were defined on the face that Dawn knew to be thin and hollow—instead, they were covered by a comfortable amount of childish fat. In his left hand was a sheet of paper with red markings at the top, shaded to where Dawn could not read the writing.

Dawn felt that she was staring at the as-of-yet unbroken spirit that was the baby that Cyrus once was—untarnished by the hostility of his parents and freed from the responsibility and pressure that Team Galactic placed upon his shoulders. Indeed, she was staring; their eyes were affixed on each other, and she wondered if this lost specter knew that she was there. The young Cyrus cocked his head and suddenly, smiled so enormously that Dawn felt her heart thaw. Oh, why did the Galactic leader spurn his emotions? They were such a wonderful thing; they suited his youthful self quite well.

"Hello," the little Cyrus said to her. "Who are you? You're so pretty."

Dawn managed a weak smile back to the fabricated personality. Something within her told her that this was not merely a figment of her dream world. "My name is Dawn," she replied, crouching to meet the boy's level. "What's yours?"

"I'm Cyrus," the child responded, his voice bubbly and gleeful. "I like to play with robots. I have a lot of them. I made them all myself. Do you like robots, Dawn?"

"I don't know much about them," Dawn said, "but I would love to see one of yours someday."  
Cyrus smiled with huge breadth. Dawn saw that one of his front teeth was missing. "You would? Thank you!" He cheered. "Mommy and Daddy don't think my robots are cool. They tell me to study instead. But studying is so boring. I wanna find new stuff out on my own."

_This boy… he_ is _Cyrus. _Dawn's heart wrenched. What had happened to the Galactic leader that had so drastically transformed him from this friendly child to a cold, indignant man with a warped philosophy? Trying to distract herself from that thought, Dawn pointed to the paper the youngster was holding. "What's that?" she inquired.

"It's my math test." The young Cyrus's chest puffed out with pride. "See? I got a hundred percent." He handed the paper to Dawn with his grubby hands—and sure enough, a one hundred was written atop his choppily written name in red pen. There was a small grease print on the paper where his fingers had been. "I'm really good at math. Teacher says so, too. She thinks I'll be a good scientist someday."

Dawn's heart sank. _Someday._"You are much better than me," Dawn said. "Your teacher is right. You're very smart."

Cyrus's face lit up like a streetlamp, beaming so vibrantly at Dawn that she felt warmth cover her, his happiness contagious. "Really? You think so?" He asked, his question laced with excitement.

"I do," Dawn said, able to force another smile.

The young Cyrus let go of the paper and suddenly rushed into her arms, wrapping his tiny limbs around her back, unable to reach all the way about her. "Thank you so much!" he gushed. "Thank you! You're so nice!" His hug heated Dawn in the way only childish virtue could, and abruptly, Dawn did not feel that she was being embraced by Cyrus, but merely a baby whose life was bereft of family affection and despondent of friendship. She was overpowered by a hundred thousand sentiments at once—love for this stranded child that had once been the man that ruled over her, pity for the man he had become, and frustration that he refused the change that flawed outlook. She wondered if Cyrus had ever been bombarded with such a mélange of emotion, even just once.

As she enfolded the little boy in her embrace, Dawn noticed the darkness around them render as a new form appeared—a tall, thin, pale, and extremely recognizable one. Glancing up from the dark pant legs that she was staring at from her position, her eyes wandered up until they met the eyes of her new visitor. The current Cyrus, dressed in full Galactic uniform, stared down at them with an expression that tried to mask itself as blank and unrepentant, as he usually was, but Dawn could easily read the awe that was behind the pretense. For the briefest of moments, dejection reflected in his face, and his empty eyes were momentarily filled with every available emotion that was possible by the human soul. A soul that Dawn never thought Cyrus had.

_He's just misguided… isn't he?_

Perhaps he was not evil.

Perhaps Cyrus was just lonely.

()()()

With a start, Dawn jolted awake and sat up. She was back in her room in the grunts' quarters with Jupiter looming over her with the harrowing, ominous shadow of a Mewtwo. Whipping her head around in complete confusion, she speculated as to how she'd gotten back here. How long had she been asleep? An hour, maybe two? When had Jupiter come in? She stole a peek at the clock—four in the afternoon. When had she been brought to Cyrus? She could remember. And she hadn't been here when she dozed off. She'd been with…

Without delay, every second and steamy movement in Cyrus's bedroom rushed into Dawn's recollection, causing her flesh to blush and her legs to tingle. She pressed her thighs together, guilty and ashamed of where his mouth had been. Oh, why did he have to do that? Previously, all Dawn had known about Cyrus was purely selfish greed, wanton but still self-absorbed. Then, all of a sudden, he drags her into his room and… and… _ravishes_her? In truth, Dawn felt more violated with his act of selfless pleasure than with his usual routine with her. One-sided sex was a payment, an act that was required as means of fulfilling a contract. Surrendering one's own gratification for the stimulation of their partner was… intimate, and there was nothing Dawn wanted less than to be intimate with this heartless man—ill-advised attitude and loneliness notwithstanding.

Cyrus had already taken her virginity; at the very minimum, she wanted to save her first orgasm for a man that she truly loved. But Cyrus laid claim to that as well. Dawn had always been secure in the idea that orgasms only truly happened when one was attracted to or in love with their sexual companion, and when it came to the Galactic leader, Dawn held him in neither opinion. He was in no way entitled to what she'd given him.

_But he still has it anyway._

"Dawn." Jupiter's voice was a tolling church bell in the midst of a foggy village, jolting Dawn back into reality. She'd completely forgotten that the Galactic Commander was standing right by her bed. The purple-haired woman was giving her a cynical but fond smirk. "You think almost as much as you ask questions, girl."

_Girl._That informal moniker shook her. Cyrus never addressed her by name; he preferred to catch her attention by calling her "girl." Jupiter, of course, used the word in a playful context, but in Cyrus's tone, it made her feel insignificant and inferior. Obviously, that was his game, as he was the most controlling person Dawn had ever known. He had to be above her. Above everyone, at all times.

"I'm sorry," Dawn apologized. And she was, honestly so—mulling was not healthy in an environment like this one. "Er—how did I get back here? And how long was I there?"

"Questions again," Jupiter scoffed, although she was used to Dawn's nosiness by now. "One of Cyrus's guards brought you in at noon. You two were in his room for a good three hours or so. Then, less than thirty minutes ago, I was meandering about in the halls in this wing of the grunts' quarters when Cyrus appeared to me. He was carrying you and handed you off to me, mumbling some incoherency about having to work and wandering away."

"Oh." Cyrus hadn't made the effort to wake her? Why not? With a bleak revelation, the  
blood drained from her face. "Was I… um, naked?"

Jupiter gave her an odd look before barking a short laugh. "Naked? My Arceus, Dawn, what were you two doing in there?" She chortled. "No. Cyrus might be oblivious to disgrace, but he had the mind to make sure you were dressed."

Stealing a downward glance, Dawn saw indeed that she was clothed. Even her boots had been put back on, gleaming with the clarity of a lake's surface from being polished—whether their arrival had been because of Cyrus or Jupiter or even her dazed self, she didn't know. Something was tickling the bottom of her neck. Pulling back the front of her turtleneck sweater, she noticed that the tag was the culprit.

"He put my shirt on backwards," Dawn noted dully.

"He did look half-asleep," Jupiter noticed. "I will not ask what happened, out of respect for my leader's private life and yours, but did it involve a nap?"

Winding through the embarrassing but silent recount of Cyrus's head in places where it should not have been, Dawn remembered the coffee table, followed by plunging into a state of rapture and unconsciousness. Three hours, Jupiter had said. Surely what Cyrus had done hadn't taken more than a few minutes. Had they… literally slept together? In the same bed? Cyrus had indeed seemed tired, but Dawn would never have connected him with wanting other people nearby when he slept. Though she knew differently, Cyrus alienated others to the point that they think that he liked his solitude.

"Yes," Dawn said shortly. "I suppose it did."

"Well, I'm glad that you're rested," Jupiter said. "You're meeting the boy in fifteen minutes. I was going to awaken you if you didn't get up on your own, but I came in just in the nick of time, so it seems."

Dawn sighed. She'd nearly forgotten. Normally, she would be ecstatic to see her childhood friend, but after what had played out earlier in the day, she was too remorseful to face Lucas. He loved her so much—she felt that she was a traitor to him. "Okay," she said, turning her body to stand up from the bed. "Are you going to bring me?"

"I don't trust the guards outside to take you anywhere beyond the locker room," Jupiter told her. Reaching into the pocket of her complex jumpsuit, she pulled out a plastic square in the color of soft orange. The shade was pleasant to Dawn's eye. She wanted to paint a room with it. "Cyrus told me that you were running out of these."

Dawn's stomach clenched. Birth control pills! Cyrus had forced her to start taking them not two days after he started to take her and she hated how moody they made her. And the aspect of controlling her period seemed overbearing and scheming—just like a certain man she knew. But what was worse than employing in them was pregnancy, and she certainly did not want that. She wasn't sure that she could love a child with Cyrus's genetics. Reluctantly, she took them from Jupiter and placed them on her dresser. The blasted man refused to use a condom. _He might be lonesome, but he's still a selfish prick._

"Let's go," Jupiter said, beckoning to her as she ducked out of the electronic sliding door leading into Dawn's room. Hesitating but still willing, she followed.

She did not love Cyrus. She loved Lucas. His hands on her hips, her breasts, and his mouth all over her helped her realize that. Cyrus was an man encapsulated in a never-ending state of soullessness—Dawn would not put it past him to toy with her by falsifying his emotions. No matter how genuine he had seemed today, it was a lie. It _had_to be. No matter how much she had enjoyed it, she hadn't.

He was a liar. A bastard, a rapist, out of his mind, and a liar.

_… Thank you… you're so nice!_

The words echoed in her head, and Dawn tried not to let her heart break.

_Something was telling her that she was wrong._

()()()

Dawn wished that she was not seeing Lucas as she entered the familiar interrogation room, with its asylum-white walls and its table and chairs, bolstered to the floor as if her friend would fly into a madcap rage and pitch his seat at the wall—for some strange reason, Cyrus had not ordered grunts to be posted inside this time. _Did he trust her, or did he just forget? _Yet while Lucas's fuse was short, Dawn had always considered him not to have the strength—until she walked in and her eyes fell upon his massive biceps, twice the size they were over a month ago. They lingered there, and Dawn realized that Lucas was not the boy she had grown up with, but a blossoming masculine force.

When her vision wandered to his face, she saw that even his countenance—the sole part of him that Dawn could read like her favorite book—was drastically altered. The bright, vivacious diamond eyes that had trailed her movements as a girl now assessed them calmly, calculation and his hidden intelligence reflecting instead. His lips were pressed into a firm but lucid smile, not as wildly happy and unrestrained as it was before. Still, something glimmered in secret behind his front—an untamed frenzy that all young men possessed at some point in their lives. He was not a boy anymore. Lucas was a man.

And that attracted Dawn in a way that she had never felt for Lucas before.

"Dawn," he murmured reverentially, rising as she came in. He traveled around the table to hug her, smothering her against his muscular chest with his solid arms. Lucas reeked of the terrible prison odor, mingling blood and sweat in a dance that was all but enjoyable. Even the stench of cigarette smoke accompanied him, hanging over him with the heaviness of a thunderstorm. But Dawn pressed into him—she could feel Lucas's love imbuing into her, making her whole again after her confusing clash with Cyrus. This boy—no, man—he loved her with his entire heart, and she had shunned him romantically for all these years.

How could she have ignored it?

How could she have pushed away a love this powerful?

"Mm," she murmured, burrowing her face into Lucas's vest, brushing away the smell as much as possible. "Lucas, I missed you so much. You look so good."

Pulling away slightly, Lucas wiggled his eyebrows connotatively. "Does that mean I'm sexy?" He joked. For years, the pair had always given each other false compliments and sexually-fueled insults, but Dawn never meant them. Perhaps Lucas had, but not her.

Not until now, anyway.

"Yes," Dawn confirmed. "It does, actually."

Immediately, Lucas's face dropped and a raging blush covered his face. For sixteen years he'd loved her—and Dawn was aware, but she declined to admit it. It was just puppy love, she'd told herself; when he meets another girl, he'll get over it eventually. Her parents and his had always disagreed with her, but she had been firm in her conviction. Even the simple citizens of Twinleaf Town tried to convince her differently to no avail.

She loved him.

She hoped she loved him.

"Hey," he said, sputtering momentarily after recovering from Dawn's minor coup de grace. "Look what I can do now." Gripping her by the waist with both hands, Lucas lifted her into the air with ease, now several inches taller than her instead of equal in height, thanks to ongoing exercise and food consumption. Dawn squealed, the first trustworthy smile that she'd had in a very long time reaching the corners of her lips. Lucas beamed up at her with so much worship that nearly all rebuttal Dawn felt melted away like springtime snow.

"Put me down, or I'll kick you in the stomach," Dawn threatened with a chuckle. "I'm in the perfect position for it."

"Ouch, baby," he said. His eyes widened. "Have you gained weight?"

Dawn landed a light, playful jab into his gut, and Lucas mockingly gasped. He set her down on the floor. "Hey, easy on the fat jokes," Dawn said. "I'm a girl."

"Right," Lucas grinned. "I forgot."

"Asshole."

"You love it."

There was no holding back. She had done it for far too long. She lived a life of doubts—and being held captive by Team Galactic was not the cursor of that problem. Every day, she'd woken up with Lucas living next door, dreaming about her in colors that did not exist in the real world with a wonderment that most adults could never achieve, much less an adolescent. She could almost taste his sorrows and his devotion toward her, a soul mate that did not relent, despite years of rejection. Lucas had kissed her on the cheek on their first day of kindergarten and he had not stopped blending himself into Dawn. She knew that if he had the choice, he would do so forever, even beyond the days when they would both be old and infirm. Lucas's love was enduring. Nobody could take that from her.  
Not even the man that had robbed her of everything else.

Standing on her tiptoes, Dawn pressed her lips against Lucas's.

It took a moment for her childhood friend to register this moment that he'd been patiently waiting for since he was roughly three and a half, but when he did, he responded, and Dawn felt her world go black and white in numbness around her. He grabbed her gently by the forearms and ran his fingers down her wrists, moving his mouth against hers. Dawn sensed his diffidence to slip his tongue in, so Dawn parted her lips just so, inviting him inside. Gratefully, he did so—and there was nothing but passion and friendship and perfection in their kiss. There was a welling hotness in Dawn's belly that made her head pound agreeably and her toes tingle. It was a beautiful feeling, one that she wanted to pocket away and pull out to charge her whenever she was down. Oh, only Lucas made her experience this.

_So did Cyrus._

She was stricken by that conspiratorial whisper in her mind and pretended that it wasn't right. She hadn't enjoyed today. No—she denied that she did. Only sluts would have. And she was not a slut. She was Cyrus's in name only. Her heart belonged to Lucas.

Thankfully, Lucas did not notice her distress and broke the kiss, stepping back to stare at her. "Wow," he said. "Oh, wow. I love you so much." He was stunned but absolutely giddy, capricious in his joy. He glowed so heartily that the rays of his ecstasy touched Dawn softly on the cheek like a caress. Sallying forth, he took her into his arms once again with the world's tenderness beating against Dawn.

She opened her mouth to reciprocate the words she ached to so much to say back to him.

But they did not come.


	20. Part 19

_They hated him._

_Why did they never smile? Cyrus never remembered them smiling. They were always scowling at everything that he did, be it innocent mistakes or just another foolhardy attempt to please them. They spoke in a monotone; there was no spirited lift in their voices. Constantly, they addressed him in a hard, disapproving manner that left no room for warmth. If Cyrus had wanted moral support, they refused to give it to him, claiming that he was self-sufficient enough to sustain himself. As a child, he was scared of the dark, but his parents attributed that fear to cowardice and rejected his request for a nightlight. Cyrus had spent endless nights staring up at the blackened ceiling, tears bluing his face and swelling his eyes completely shut, his cries of loneliness going unnoticed by his passive parents. His father never played catch with him or told him about girls, and his mother never held him or made him an after-school snack. They sat instead, their eyes affixed to books, and told Cyrus to go away._

_He did go away. He went away and allowed his thoughts to fester into ugly mental welts._

_He had no siblings; for good reason, too, for Cyrus was thankful that his damned parents didn't subject their emotional abuse to anyone else. Rapidly, he became independent, making his own food and doing his homework by himself. He labored over his studies, hoping for an A, for anything less was a failure in their eyes. For days, he would long for the moment when his parents would tire of his despised presence and release him to his grandfather's for a while so they could "breathe and relax." Cyrus didn't mind it there—he had many visiting cousins that would reluctantly let him play with them, and his grandfather was an easygoing man that only scolded Cyrus when he did something truly wrong. During this couple of hours' time, Cyrus fit in. He was loved._

_But he was not loved enough._

_One day, he woke up and pushed his emotions into a box and locked them away, burrowing them so deep within his psyche that those who dared to reach them failed. His parents, for once, were satisfied—their son became a drone, working on his machines and his academics as his bitter revenge grew. Cyrus, like his parents, began to reject the existence of everyone else. Teachers, peers who tried to become his friend—every hand that reached out to him was slapped away. Cyrus cultivated his emotionless soul alone; and, as he was alone, he began to think. Emotions, he decided, were the root of all evil within this veritable planet. The only cure of ignorance and passion was to destroy the earth and create a new one—one that conformed to his beliefs, views that he knew were correct above all._

_No one could stop him. No one._

Why?

_He was only doing what he thought was truly right. He was never encouraged to do just that, but what did the opinions of sentient, swooning idiots matter to him? In his eyes, the world was better painted black, a parallel of his former phobia. There would be enough to allow a few pinpricks of light—stars, not hope. The stars were wiser than he. They were studious, careful, taking their time to reach their destination. Those who were not couldn't fully appreciate them, Cyrus believed._

_Yet the girl had, and she was had not one of those qualities. For some reason, he couldn't push her away like the others. She kept coming back to him._

_Somehow, he couldn't hate her anymore for that._

()()()

_"This," Cyrus bellowed, slamming his fists down on the elongated conference table, causing his four Commanders to jump slightly, "is completely futile! You mean to tell me that nothing has been achieved? No word on Uxie, Mespirit, and Azelf's whereabouts? What have you four been doing—sweeping the floors with your stupidity?"_

_In this regular, monthly meeting with his thoughtless underlings that he'd made the mistake of giving authority to, Cyrus was sitting with Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars as they twiddled their thumbs like brain-dead fools and tapped their pencils against blank pads of paper. Charon, the old fogey, was in bed with a stomachache, one of the many he'd been having lately. Only Jupiter appeared calm and collected—simply because it wasn't her task any longer to concentrate on Team Galactic's ultimate plans, aside from the occasional input. She was assigned to the girl full-time, and Cyrus silently pardoned her for that. His bone was with the remaining three of his Commanders, all of whom were competent enough, but merely not rising to their quotas. Reproachful, Cyrus glared at them as they cowered beneath his seething frustration. What dimwits had he hired? Had they blissfully forgotten their duties? Dialgla and Palika would not come to Cyrus on their own. He wouldn't need them anymore at that point—but first, he had to get there. Their dithering was not helping._

_"Um, sir, you see, there have been a lot of problems lately," Mars managed, playing with a strand of her short red hair. "The grunts have been really, really bored, and they've been causing trouble, and—"_

_"Enough of your blathering!" Cyrus snapped at Mars. "That isn't reason enough. You are perfectly capable of controlling your soldiers. Are you daft, woman?" His head whipped to Saturn, who was trying to put on a front of control. "Saturn, you are my right hand. What in Arceus's name is going on? You have jurisdiction over everyone sans myself. Explain to me the root of this shortcoming."_

_Saturn sighed shakily, leveling his gaze with his chief's steadily. "I know why," he said calmly, "but you won't like it, sir."_

_"I don't care," Cyrus spat. "Don't you dare hide things from me. I am your leader."_

_"It's the girl," he said. "That one that we are quartering with the grunts? She's sapping our resources. She's eating the extra rations that we could be giving to the soldiers, and having guards posted at her location is weakening our manpower. Not to mention you are always with her, and that limits our ability to confer with you. You haven't been around actively for three months, sir. We can't do this without you."_

_Saturn's report struck a nerve within Cyrus. As much as the truth wanted to make him gnash his teeth, his second-in-command was somewhat correct. He'd become infatuated with the girl, to the point that he was starting to neglect his position. But he'd made sure to do work in-between times—how was his contribution compromised? Cyrus had done plenty of research and relayed those reports to Mars and Saturn. Indeed, he had been… disposed of lately, but what followed the research was not of his concern. His plans could only be executed once Mars and Saturn were able to track the Lake Trio's movements. They hadn't even been able to do that right._

_"Since I've provided you with adequate material to work from," Cyrus said evenly to Saturn, his face straightened to his usual expression, "I am going to tell you that I will decide when the girl becomes too much of a distraction. The fault is not entirely mine."_

_Saturn turned red in aggravation and opened his mouth to rejoinder, but Jupiter noticed and spoke in his place. "Hold your tongue, Saturn," Jupiter said. "He's right. You haven't completely finished your part as well."_

_"Maybe we'd get more done if he wasn't fucking that prisoner," Mars muttered to herself, though unintentionally loud enough for everyone seated in the room to hear._

_Cyrus held back the urge to leap across the table and choke her for her impertinence. He stopped himself, knowing that anger was an emotion. He remained staid-faced, but he twisted his fingers in his lap out of sight until his knuckles turned white._

_Jupiter glared at Mars and pointed a sharp finger at the younger Commander. "You be quiet as well, you little snitch," she growled._

_"What?" Mars asked, feigning naivety. "It's an open secret."_

_"I'm sitting right here, bitch," Cyrus said tonelessly._

_Everyone at the table turned to stare at him. They had never heard Cyrus curse before. In all honesty, Cyrus hadn't used an obscenity in quite a long time, either. Mars's lack of respect warranted it. He watched as Mars shrunk back into her chair, expecting some form of brutal punishment or verbal lashing, but Cyrus found that he was tiring of this. Standing up as a signal to close the assembly, nothing having been accomplished, everyone else rose. Saturn and Mars didn't look at him, afraid that doing so would entail them bursting into flames._

_"Get Charon out of bed and have him help you catch up on the work that you two have been ignoring," Cyrus ordered to the skittish pair. "You are dismissed. All of you. Jupiter, come to my office in one hour. I need to discuss something with you."_

_All too eager to depart, Saturn and Mars fled to the electronic door that slid open into the liberation of the hallway. Jupiter lingered, hesitating to depart, but she did so anyway, making sure that the other two Commanders were long gone when she did so._

_"Do you want me to get her?" She asked as Cyrus wandered over to the single-story window that gave insight to the dense forest outside, folding his hands behind his back._

_Cyrus gazed to the afternoon shadows cast upon the lofty pines as he thought about his response. "No," he said finally. "Not now. Bring her when you come to my office later."_

_"Yes, sir," Jupiter said. Cyrus heard her turn, her footfalls echoing in the large room with its high ceiling, the slight hiss of the door opening accompanying her exit._

_Out of nowhere, Cyrus began to remember the very first day that he'd been with the girl. He recollected her entering with her blameless but awed disposition and sitting down before his desk, struggling to make eye contact with him—a problem that she rarely had these days. How domineering he'd desired to be over her, that instinctive famine that had gripped him like a ravenous appetite. Her questions, timid and docile, that had led to him bending her over the desk and taking her in a way only fiends did._

_What had he said to her? He racked his memory, trying to find their furious, vehement exchange. Three months ago was more lengthy than it seemed. Ah, now he recalled—what prophetic words they had been. Why had he even said them? Had he disregarded what he might have augured with them? Yes, he realized, answering his rhetorical question. He had. He was pathetic enough in those days to not think._

Never forget my face, and I shall never forget yours.

_Cyrus covered his face with his hands and leaned against the glass._

_Those words just had to have come true._


	21. Part 20

**Oy vey, you can tell that I'm getting close to finishing this. The writing in these last few chapters has been so rushed. I'm sorry about that. It tends to happen when loss of inspiration sets in.**

**There will be some Lucas/Dawn lovin' in the next chapter. And it will be wonderful, I can promise you that.**

**Reviews and feedback are always appreciated! Your support (or criticism) is what keeps me writing!**

**-Silent-Protagonist**

()()()

Emotions are the most perplexing of things. The universal tenure of emotions is that they happen all at once in a delicate gale, or play out individually like monologues on stage in a never-ending drama. Every feeling stood upon this rostrum, dressed in elegant outfits in corporeal forms, exuding a color that represents the taste of the imperfect, unsettled heart of the owner that sat behind the curtains, watching helplessly as each one stepped up to the spotlight and surfaced beneath their holder's skin. For Dawn, anger was a tall man embellished in crimson, and confusion was a handsome child in purple coattails. She hadn't met love yet—for though she believed that she loved Lucas, but that artist of the hour had not yet arrived. As waited patiently for its long-anticipated appearance upon her stage, Dawn had to deal with Cyrus.

But what she discovered about the man was that when his few but budding emotions arose, they did not perform in discordant or melodious strife, unlike everyone else in the world—when he felt, even just barely, Dawn saw the contradiction in Cyrus's eyes that forced them backstage, too scared to let his emotions come out of the hiding place that they'd held for so many years. Instead of letting them go, Cyrus allowed them to accumulate, falling snow around his already cold and unresponsive self. Lucas was emotionally free and was never afraid to speak his mind, and Dawn had lived her entire life with that mentality. Cyrus's grapple for "perfection" through banishing his emotions was unusual—and, Dawn knew, would someday be futile.

Somehow, Dawn found that strangely beautiful. He wasn't like others. He didn't know how to deal with the occasional feelings that tried to emerge from his barred mind, so he pushed the further and further back. Dawn knew that someday, all that endeavoring to reject the simplest of human behavior would be detrimental—Cyrus would explode, and there would be no more holding back. He wouldn't be insecure anymore. He'd break into a thousand pieces, then stand shakily in the rubble and struggle to pick them back up. It really was interesting, because he was much different now that he'd been the day Dawn was captured well over three-and-a-half months ago. Back then, she'd truly found Cyrus to be a man that prevailed over her. He'd been a figure whose authority was completely unquestionable. In those days, she was fearful of what Cyrus was capable of if she defied him.

Now, in Dawn's eyes, that the adult form, the adult decisions, and the adult desires that Cyrus had were null and void. Cyrus might have been physically matured, but she knew that deep inside, he was nothing but that fragile little boy who had appeared to her once in a dream. He looked down upon her, but Dawn only felt sorry for him. He was like every other man in the Pokemon world that had controlled an evil organization at one point or another—misguided, confused, and on the verge of collapse. He'd never had parents to hold his hand through the best and the worst of times, nor friends to substitute. Cyrus Akagi, she realized, had always been alone.

What he'd done to her was not a way of exerting his power. Perhaps that's what he'd intended at the time, but Cyrus was built from lies. All Dawn wanted was to see the man that he was beneath the false supremacy and nihilistic sense of influence. That wasn't him. That wasn't the real him at all. But Dawn still didn't know who true Cyrus _was_. So while she waited for her love of Lucas to become patently clear, she also waited for Cyrus.

She waited for him, and hoped that the snow around him would melt just long enough for Dawn to understand.

()()()

Before she got to see Lucas several days later, Dawn had to go to Cyrus once again. She did not want to see the man and his doleful eyes that had once been hard and inscrutable, touch his ice-cold skin or even be in his presence—ever since the day that he'd pleasured her instead of himself, Dawn found it difficult to even be in the same room as him. She felt awkward at the intimacy that they'd shared. Cyrus had been the last person that she'd wanted to see her in such a compromised position.

But she shoved her apprehension back long enough to replace those thoughts with those of Lucas—the abrasion of his lips against hers, the pure love that had poured into her, and her fingers on his wall of muscle that he'd built over the months of incarceration. Those memories did not arouse her, but they did comfort her misgivings as she walked down the hall to Cyrus's bedroom, Jupiter flanking her watchfully. Dawn wanted to drown in Lucas's grey, diamond-hued eyes, shining with joy as he'd pulled away from their brief kiss. Even now, Dawn could still taste the repugnance of cigarettes and the forced lack of hygiene on his breath, and that filled her with an impression of ownership. It was as if she finally had Lucas as her own—and the kiss had sealed an invisible contract between him.

She kept this in mind as Jupiter opened the doors to Cyrus's room and ushered her inside, whispering amends for her to be safe before closing them behind her. Lucas's face stayed imprinted on her mind, wrapping around her like a blanket. He was her safety as well as her security, for even through this strife and confusion, Lucas remained constant—a fixture in her life that would never change.

Dawn took a deep breath and glanced around the room, surprised at the calmness that filled the large walls. There were no artificial lights on in Cyrus's big but scantly furnished home; instead, a window adjacent to his closet was wide open, the white curtains billowing in the warm breeze of the springtime fervor. It was midafternoon, and the sun was high enough in the sky that one could sit nearby and read a book to it, which was exactly what the Galactic leader was doing. Perched on the end of his bed, one uniform-clad leg crossed over the other, Cyrus was buried in a sleeveless hardback novel, his profile facing the door. Dawn could not read the title from the spine from where she was standing.

The scene was one of total peace. _How baffling._

Blinking once at the sound of her arrival, Cyrus looked up from his book, his stable eyes affixed on her. Momentarily, Dawn saw something enigmatic slip by in his blank expression. "There you are," Cyrus said, placing the novel face-down on his bedspread. "I was wondering when you'd be here. Come."

Moving swiftly, Dawn hurried over to the man. She wasn't as frightened of him as she once was, but the feeling of his gaze unswervingly on her still made her edgy. She stood before him, not quite sure what she was expecting, until Cyrus glanced up and patted the empty space on the sheets before him. "Sit down with your back to me," he gently ordered. Diffidently, Dawn did so, skeptical of his intentions. This was a mysterious position, and one that did not have much sexual versatility, Dawn noted.

_Maybe-_

"Do you have a hair tie?" Cyrus asked stoically. Dawn was shocked that he would need such a simple—and feminine!—object. Luckily, Jupiter lent her several, and she always carried them around with her in case she felt the need to tie her hair back. Reaching into the pocket of the short pink skirt that Cyrus had chosen for her so long ago, Dawn retracted a black elastic tie and handed it back to the Galactic leader.

"Thank you," Cyrus said before gathering all of Dawn's hair—not done up today and resting well below her shoulders in a straight, simple manner—and yanking his fingers through it roughly, undoing the knots and causing Dawn to yelp in pain.

"Quiet," he hissed. "Hold still and stop complaining. This won't take long." Dawn felt him deftly separate her hair into separate strands before tugging on each, and sharp pressure speared Dawn's scalp as he twisted and pulled the tendrils with skilled rapidness. Dawn recognized the familiar yanking on her scalp as the same pain that she'd suffered when her mother braided her hair as a child. She'd done it for her daughter before Dawn learned to do her hair on her own when she was nine. The wrenching was as old as it was nostalgic—and powerful as it instilled puzzlement.

_… Wait. He isn't…?_

"Are you braiding my hair?" Dawn queried in an amazed tone. She allowed him to jerk her head back to give him more flexibility of her hair. She didn't want him to stop. This was too staggering for her to comprehend, more so than any of the other disclosures that Cyrus had revealed over the course of their odd relationship.

"French braiding," Cyrus blandly corrected. "Didn't I tell you to hold still?"

Thrashing to reposition herself, Dawn's back shot up, perpendicular to the bed and stiff, worried that a single movement might deter him from continuing this oddly wonderful moment. Cyrus grunted and went on with his braiding, the entire situation making Dawn awkward but somewhat grateful. Why Cyrus of all people—a man, and one of his serious composure—knew how to braid was beyond her, but she bit her tongue. This was fascinating to her, so she allowed him to play with her smooth, prized hair. They sat like this for a while as Cyrus moved down the length of her dark locks, the stress upon her head lessening the further he went. He didn't make idle conversation, and Dawn wasn't inclined to start one. This peculiar yet somewhat blissful activity was in silence.

Dawn did not think about anything. Not Lucas, not her imprisonment, not even the man sitting behind her, doing her hair. Her mind went white as the prickling sensation eased her troubled nerves.

Finally, Cyrus finished his work, and Dawn heard the snapping of her hair tie as he fastened the end of the French braid. "There," he said before swallowing. "I don't have a mirror in my room. You can look over at the window and see your reflection."

Having a sense that he was lying about the mirror, but still not questioning his hesitation, Dawn turned her head toward the open glass panes to her right, and her likeness caught her off guard. The braid was perfect—every weave was in place from the crest of her hairline to the end, which fell down to the middle of her back. Tentatively, she touched the braid. It was hard and tight, just how an excellent plait should be. It was better than any girl had ever done.

Her mouth was exceptionally dry, but she spoke anyway. "I didn't know that you could… erm, do something like this."

"When I was a child, I often stayed afternoons and evenings at my grandfather's house," Cyrus told her. "My older cousins sometimes came by to visit, and only one of them was male. The others taught me how to braid their hair because they didn't trust their sisters to do it for them." Cyrus caressed Dawn's hair, mutely admiring his work. "They were worried that their siblings would take scissors to them, or spit out their gum into their curls. And, as a woman, I assume you take pride in your hair and wouldn't want anything to happen to it."

"Yes," Dawn said, still at a loss for words. "Thank you very much. This… is very nice." The following silence was lopsided, so Dawn attempted to fill the void. She pointed to the book on Cyrus's bed. "I didn't know that you read stories, either."

Cyrus picked up the novel and flipped the spine toward Dawn in a quick maneuver with his hand. "It isn't fiction," he said. "_A Brief History of Time._Intellectual material."

Dawn frowned slightly. "I didn't think you… had the time to sit down and read a book." She shoved back the statement that she wanted to use—_You don't think it's frivolous?_

"No, I don't think it's frivolous in the least," Cyrus said, as if reading her fleeing thoughts. "Nonfiction is an outlet of intelligence and, when involving the correct topic, can be an effective counter against ignorance. I applaud those who write for the benefit and spreading of science. Now, fictional adventures about this foolish man or that lovestruck woman are certainly not my fancy." Narrowing his eyes at her, Cyrus commented, "I have the humanity to read, girl."

Dawn shrugged. "I apologize if I offended you," she said, standing from her place on the bed. Interestingly, Cyrus did not try and stop her—instead, he watched her with renewed concentration. Feeling liberated and somewhat the dominant force, Dawn made her way over to the window, Cyrus's eyes on her the entire time. The portal to the outside world mesmerized her. She hadn't seen foliage, let alone breathed outdoor air in a very long time. When she looked outside, she expected to see horizons of trees and lakes, far from the industrialized anticlimax that would have been seen from the window of the base's old location in Veilstone City. To her disappointment, she was met with the trunk of an enormous pine. The smell of sap hit her nose like a fist, tangy and enticing with its woodland charm.

"Oh," Dawn mumbled, let down at the sight. Still, it was a tree and more of the outside world that she'd seen in a while, so she was thankful. Leaning forward, she noticed the verdant shimmer of a leafy green vine snaking its way up the tree, attaching itself to the spiny bark. Dawn was amazed at the color, its natural effervescence beckoning her to reach out and touch it.

"Wow, what a beautiful plant," she said. Craning her body out as far as she could reach, she snipped of a large section of the vegetation and retreated back inside, having nearly leaned out far enough to fall several feet down. Feeling the tips of the arrow-shaped leaves, she turned around to beam at Cyrus, who was standing at this point. His vision followed her dancing fingers to the vine. Upon registering it, he scowled deeply.

Walking over to him, Dawn held the green plant out to him, her heavy braid bouncing as she went. "This is a gift for you," she said. "For the braid."

"I won't accept that," Cyrus said, "because it is poison ivy."

Dawn was astonished at this revelation. She glanced down at her hands, trying to process the structure of the plant to see if he was lying—and, in fact, he wasn't, for her palms were now blistering and red with an angry rash. Shrieking, Dawn dropped the poison ivy and began to scratch furiously. She'd never been much of an outdoorsman, but even the biggest fools knew the physical makeup of poison ivy. Immediately, she was ashamed that she played herself as such an idiot. Of course, she was itchy as well, but the embarrassment overrode the pain.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Dawn cried.

"I didn't see what you were holding," Cyrus said. "Don't blame me for your own stupidity."

"May you please kiss it and make it better?" Dawn asked jokingly.

Unsurprisingly, Cyrus did not find that attempt at a humorous jab to be funny. His frown only deepened. "Of course I won't," he said. "I'll get that all over myself. The commanders would laugh."

"I was kidding," Dawn assured.

"As was I."

Before Dawn could react any further than a pensive breath at his short words, Cyrus closed the space between them with one stride of his long legs and grabbed her right, affected hand by the wrist. Acting on impulse rather than whim, Dawn tried to yank her arm away, but Cyrus's grip was as strong as vice on her. He bent over slightly, meeting his mouth with the top of her hand. Dawn inhaled loudly, the throb of her itchiness already dissipating. The Galactic leader's lips parted, and he drew two of her fingers into his mouth.

_Think of Lucas. Think of Lucas._

But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't banish the truth that was in front of her; it was Cyrus who was kissing her hand, Cyrus who was wetting her fingers with his saliva. As much as she wanted to resist it, she felt the snow melting—this Cyrus, the one that she was seeing today, was not the man that she had known before. She strived to convince herself that this was an illusion, that this fantasy of growth was all but a myth.  
She knew it wasn't. Even as Cyrus drew away and stared her black eyes down, Dawn could not speak. This was not a dream. This was reality.

Cyrus was becoming someone different.

No—he was _emerging._

"Come on," he said, gesturing toward her with his finger. "Let's get some lotion to soothe the burn." Dawn saw a slow bloom of the poison rash cover the direct area around his lips. Every ion of her wanted to laugh at him, smile at the haphazard way that he scratched at his reddening chin, but she couldn't. It was like she was in the interrogation room again, endeavoring to tell the boy the words that he so desperately needed to hear.

She couldn't tell Lucas that she loved him.

Nor could she see Cyrus as the abuser that he once was.


	22. Part 21

_Arceus, he was the luckiest boy on earth. Lucas had been waiting forever for Dawn to finally warm up to the idea of them being lovers—it was obvious to him that they should have been together a long time ago, for they had been friends much further back than he could remember. His patience paid off, and he finally had the girl he'd been dreaming of for his entire life. What joy in a dismal world such as this one! All manner of rage and hostility that once pumped through his veins and infused his blood with animal aggression was slowly fading, replaced by an adrenaline high that Lucas wished he would never come down from. He'd dreaded meeting with Dawn before in the past—and now he wasn't, because despite what Cyrus was doing to her, he was sure now that he had her._

_Or, rather, she had him._

_"See?" Huey said when Lucas stumbled back down to the prison cafeteria, a sheer orgasmic cloud following him about from his experience in the interrogation room. The veteran prisoner read Lucas without a single word from the boy. "I told you, Diamond. If you wait, good things will come."_

_"No," Rob interjected, spooning in a mouthful of mushy applesauce. Lucas barely noticed that he was missing dinner, for the Beautiflies fluttering about in his stomach destroyed his appetite in a pleasant way. "I believe that was me, you fat, old sailor."_

_"Old?" Huey narrowed his eyes at Rob. "I am not old, bird boy. I'm refined. I was boning models while you were still out, playing with your first Spearow and your underdeveloped penis."_

_As used as he was to their bantering, Lucas was easily able to tune them out. He sat down at the table, staring at the cracked gray wall between the bickering men with his equally insipid eyes, grinning stupidly as his thoughts swirled. Every second of their kiss was embedded now into his memory, playing back to him on a continuous reel. Dawn, gazing up at him with the eyes that Lucas could lose himself in, craning her tall neck up to meet his lips, letting him take hold of her and press her sweet form against his. It had been his first kiss, and their situation notwithstanding, it was as faultless as he'd imagined it. His first had even been with Dawn—again, the only person he'd ever wanted beyond simple friendship. Even at sixteen and once in a school swarming with willing young women who were frantic to have boyfriends for social purposes, Lucas was never attracted to one of them. From the beginning, the sole girl he stuck with was Dawn._

_She'd done it. They were together. Perhaps not entirely—it was difficult to maintain a relationship under the mercy of Team Galactic—but Lucas didn't care. Not with Dawn at his side._

_"Kid's drooling," Rob observed shortly, jerking a thumb at the boy, whose body was splayed across the tabletop, melting into the sloppily painted wood._

_"If he's like this when he gets kissed," Huey said humorously, "then he'll probably die from joy when he actually gets laid."_

_Dawn was in love with him now. She hadn't said it today, but Lucas was eager to give her time. He didn't need her reciprocation right away. There wasn't a chance that he was going to let her go for such a meager setback. She was confused. Cyrus was throwing her into sexual circumstances that were designed in his radical, sociopathic mentality to drive her into a state of hellish misunderstanding. Cyrus, that son of a bitch—leader of Team Galactic and the coldest, most soulless man that Lucas had ever known. He so anxiously wanted to free Dawn from his grip and take her into his arms, fearing that someday, the manipulating bastard would change Dawn so much that she would be marred unrecognizable from the abuse._

_The unrelenting paradise that Lucas basked in suddenly began to fade, morphing into something much dirtier, much more sinful—blood and revenge, dancing brutally and stomping its feet into him. The eddying, spitting anger that he'd felt the day that he took his treasured lead pipe to the obtrusive prisoner's head came back in a much milder form, but still served as means to galvanize him. He pictured Cyrus, helpless and disabled below him, taking each of Lucas's blows with a spurt of gore and sobs of apology. Lucas itched to beat this man to the core of his flesh, turn him into a writhing mass of gushing tissue, as he had with the other one. He had reason—he hated Cyrus with every fiber of his being, and not because of the inhumanity the man had committed against him._

_Lucas was now sure of two things: First, he loved Dawn. There were no more hesitations on his part. No longer did he blame her for anything. She was innocent and deserved to be protected just as much as she helped others._

_And to keep that love solid, Cyrus Akagi had to die._

_Lucas would achieve that by any means possible._

()()()

_"Isn't it weird?" Dawn intoned during their second visit eight days after their first kiss. They were standing beside each other, leaning with their backs against the table, Lucas's arms crossed over his chest and Dawn's clasped behind her back. She was so demure today, not meeting his eyes and leaving a good few inches of space between them. She stared down at the floor as she spoke in the softest voice imaginable, as if the setup was awkward to her. Lucas's eyes were on her incessantly, but she would not look at him. Lucas assumed that she was shy over their kiss—perfectly acceptable. Girls were a bit tetchy when it came to things like this, he'd noticed._

_He'd hatched a small plan earlier to help her get over that fear._

_"Isn't what weird?" Lucas asked as Dawn tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Lucas was salivating at the sight of her delicate skin that was so normally hidden beneath her heavy black curtain. She was dressed skimpily enough as it was—in the very short skirt and breast-accenting turtleneck that he'd seen her in the first time that they'd been allowed together—and though he knew the attire was of Cyrus's choosing, he at least approved of that. He stole a glance down at her long, sleek legs and swallowed. Somehow, he was daydreaming about what was between them._

_"That there aren't any guards," Dawn said. She shuffled her feet. "There weren't any last time… but Cyrus said that was because the visit was short, you know? He didn't give me a time limit on this one. And there were grunts around the first time."_

_Glancing around the room with its blank canvases of walls, Lucas noticed that she was right. Lucas found that extremely odd—wasn't Cyrus, the filthy asshole, overprotective of this girl who could take care of herself perfectly well? Initially, Lucas thought that he was, but clearly that was incorrect. Lucas found that to be a severe flaw. If it had been him in the man's place, he would always find a way to be with her unless he wasn't needed. He knew that the Galactic leader didn't trust him. What was the meaning of no supervision? He spat in Cyrus's face for his stupidity._

_Of course, he wasn't complaining. The solitude worked to Lucas's advantage. There was no way out of this place, so he and Dawn could not collaborate. But there was a way to enjoy it, he decided._

_"I don't know," Lucas said cryptically. Why was she acting so concerned? This wasn't like her, to be so absorbed about the activities of the organization that they'd failed in overthrowing. "Why does it make any difference?"_

_"It doesn't," Dawn agreed, shaking her head. "I just mean that it's strange. Cyrus isn't quite the man that would let potentially dangerous prisoners like us get together without company." As Dawn spoke the leader's accursed name, Lucas expected a flash of pain in her expression, maybe of disdain or antipathy. After all, Cyrus was inflicting the worst possible punishment on her without remorse. But, mysteriously, Dawn did not seem at all shaken by mentioning him. In fact, she seemed even calmed by it._

_Something disgusting stirred within Lucas. _Why is she…

_"I think we should see it as a blessing," Lucas said, trying to exorcise the eerie ghosts of his suspicion. He found that to be rather easy. Lucas adored Dawn, and she had never let him down as a friend. He doubted that she would do the opposite as a lover. Maybe that shift in approach toward Cyrus had been an illusion. "We can finally have some private time together." He leaned down slightly, turning his face to try and meet her shorter frame. "Hm?"_

_He detected a small smile from Dawn—that warmed his heart for only a second until he realized that it, once again, did not reach her eyes, a parallel to their initial reunion. Again, Lucas tried to ignore that, but he found it considerably harder to do this time. "Yes," she said. "I suppose you're right. We do get some time alone together."_

Together. _That word washed devotion over Lucas with the strength of a tidal wave, warming him from head to toe. That's right—they were together. And it was the most wonderful thing in the world for him right now._

Uncrossing his arms, Lucas placed his left hand on Dawn's shoulder. He whispered her name so low that he feared that she could not hear him, but she did, turning the profile of her face, glinting like the moon as she irrevocably settled her vision on him. Lucas's heart softened.

Oh, you looked at me. _Bending down, Lucas pressed his lips against Dawn's and felt her terse muscles relax as the kiss deepened. Lucas knew that he probably smelled highly unpleasant, as once-weekly showers did not produce optimal hygiene, and the savor of cigarettes wandered about in his mouth, for he was up to smoking a half-pack a day now. But that did not bother his partner. Lucas was thankful that she was so tolerant—just as she had always been._

_Dawn hadn't changed that much._

_Had she?_

_Curling her fingers out from behind her, Lucas watched her reach up to run her fingers along the tips of his cheekbones to the base of his sharp chin, her hand strolling down a bit further until it came to rest on his chest. Opening his mouth, Lucas's tongue sparred with hers in a war that left his vitality pulsating, the throb making his heart rise to his throat and his blood rush somewhere much more taboo. He grabbed her hand, squeezing it once in encouragement, reassuring her that he would not treat her like Cyrus._

_Breaking away, Lucas pulled back to see if Dawn's reaction had been as dazzling as his, and upon his scrutiny, he saw that it indeed had been. Her eyelids drooped and her cheeks were slightly flushed, her lips parted in a partial pout that drove Lucas wild. He was growing tighter and harder by the second—yet he knew this was not the right place to do anything of that sort. Still, he could not hold himself back any more. He'd been waiting too long for this._

_If there was any time, it was now._

_Dawn moved out of Lucas's embrace and hoisted herself up on the table. She sat there, smirking playfully at him with renewed verve, her eyes sparkling and waltzing to the beat of a melody that Lucas swore he could hear. Her legs were parted slightly, and when he shifted his sight in the correct way, he caught a glimpse of her white panties. Knowing her modesty, Lucas distrusted the fact that the position was intentional, but he still grinned enormously anyway._

_"What're you doing, baby?" He asked, facing her and sliding his hands around her waist. "Teasing me?"_

_Dawn's vigor disappearing for a minute, she frowned at that comment. "Teasing you how?" She asked._

_Lucas kept one eye on the panties. "Nothing," he said. "I don't believe we were finished."_

_The mischievous twinkle returned. "No," Dawn smiled. "I don't believe we were."_

_Their mouths collided again with a delicious friction that excited Lucas even more than before. The transition to a gaping kiss was almost immediate, slipping into a silent rhythm that was interrupted only by the occasional sigh or moan emitted by either. Lucas found his hands rambling at their own accord, sliding up and down her shapeless yet indefinitely sexy hips and rubbing her naked thighs with fervor. In no way did Dawn try to deter him from this obviously sexual trick—instead, she seemed to hearten him by placing both hands on his neck and moving her lengthy, thick nails around his firm neck, the tickle sending electricity through to every limb of Lucas's body._

_Lucas's finger trailed up beneath the meager fold of her dusty pink skirt and found the stiff line where the nonexistent leg of Dawn's panties began, mere centimeters away from the very part of her that he coveted. The tip of his digit dipped stealthily beneath this line, now resting on the coarse edge of what Lucas knew was hair. Dawn's body jolted all at once and this time, her response was wholly negative—she split the kiss and gently placed both hands on Lucas's chest, gazing dolefully up at him._

_"Please," she whispered, her voice suddenly forlorn with a sort of sadness that he could not place. "Not now, Lucas. Not here. Not today."_

_Crestfallen, Lucas removed his hand from her leg. "When?" he begged, failing to not sound glum. "Why not?"_

_Tugging him nary an inch closer, Dawn stretched to grab the end of Lucas's red beret and pulled it down over his eyes, as she'd done many times to him as a child. As he struggled to readjust his hat, Dawn answered him. "Soon," she said. "I promise. I will not deny you what you want, because I think I want it, too."_

_Lucas bit his lip. "But you don't know," he said. "You don't know that you want it. You only think."_

_"Isn't it better than not?" Dawn inquired sagaciously._

_"Yes," Lucas admitted. "But it isn't fair to me. Is this about Cyrus?"_

_Dawn fell silent, her eyes flickering downcast once again. Lucas became frustrated. What was her deal with not meeting people's gazes? That was the most important part of human connection, and Dawn was denying him that. He'd felt _au fait, _so on top of his credence that Dawn loved him, though she was hesitant to confess it as openly as he. Was he really wrong? He'd thought that she wanted this. Wanted him. Why else would she kiss him? Mere friends didn't share such romantic, physical moments. For whom was she compensating?_

_Was Lucas right? Was she really hesitating because of—_

_"I have to go." Dawn jumped off the table. "I'll come see you later, okay?" She didn't even give one parting glance back as she left, vanishing out the door and closing it diffidently behind her, leaving Lucas to wait for her to alert the guards to take him back to the prison. Lucas felt abandoned. She was absent now, forcing him to go back to that hole that he ate in, breathed in, and hated himself in. Why was she being so disloyal to him? They were best friends—best friends with benefits, until the very end of their lives. They were literal soul mates without the burden or the responsibility. Their relationship was purer than the finest lake, more open than the broadest mind. And yet she was gone._

_She was going back to Cyrus._

_Dawn made him feel a lot of things over the years, but rejection was not one of them._


	23. Part 22

**This chapter is in no way a climax. We still have a ways to go, folks.  
**

**Please drop a review if you can 3 I'd like to know how I'm doing! Man, sorry for the terseness, I'm just so damn tired. I love you, readers and reviews! Keep up the great work!  
**

**-Silent-Protagonist  
**

****()()()

**Present day.**

_The Piplup was small—small and vulnerable, certainly of no use to Team Galactic with its weakness. The only solution was to return this feeble fighter to its trainer, so it wouldn't backlog the much stronger Pokemon that could be donated to his grunts. At least that's what Cyrus told himself. It was in no way to make the girl happy. He had not been spurred by the drawing of the frail bird that had once hung in his closet—and for two whole months, he would get dressed every day with one eye on the horrid art. No, he had not thought about her. Not once. He had to continue the illusion that he was still intact. That he was not broken apart by the emotions that lied just beneath his surface, threatening to transpire and destroy his image as a man completely in control._

_He knew he was lying to himself. He didn't know why he tried anymore._

_The Piplup fluttered and chirped as it dashed the expanse of Cyrus's office, cheeping at its miniscule reflection in the large windows and pecking experimentally at the Galactic leader's pant leg. It was thankful to him for the exercise, as it had been kept in its Pokeball in a small room for the past four months. The enormous office perplexed and consternated the Pokemon with glee as it ran about, to and fro, happily making noises and studying everything with its wide, curious eyes. The Pokemon reminded Cyrus of a certain girl that he knew, from the unrelenting positivity to the interest it took in even the most remotely boring objects._

_At that brief notion, he felt something within him crack._

_"Piplup." The water bird hobbled over to Cyrus for the tenth time since he'd ordered for the Pokemon to be brought to his office a half-hour ago. Its excitement had seemed unremitting, and its boundless energy was beginning to exhaust him. With the steadiness of a human baby's first shaky steps, the Piplup tried to stand as regally as Cyrus, imitating the hands clasped behind him and his domineering stance as he stared outside to the expansive blue sky, cirrus clouds roiling in the clear air. Cyrus glanced down at the tiny Pokemon beside him, puffing out its chest and putting on a serious guise._

_"Are you pretending to be me?" Cyrus inquired._

_"Pip," the Piplup confirmed before teetering over to the side, flailing its flippers and shrieking, toppling over onto the grainy hairs of the carpet. It floundered about, emitting cries of distress as it attempted to force itself upright. Sighing, Cyrus knelt and picked up the fowl and stood again with it in his arms. The Piplup cheered happily, flapping its stubby wings and squawking joyfully at the sight of the outdoors. No matter how hard he tried to be cross with the Piplup, its noisiness did not annoy Cyrus. Instead, he somehow felt uplifted._

He felt.

_"Are you hungry?" Cyrus asked the Pokemon. Piplup sneezed in response. Hesitantly, Cyrus reached into his pocket and pulled out a half-eaten packet of potato chips that he'd bought at a vending machine nearby the girl's room earlier, the griminess of the junk food—something that he normally frowned upon, but he did allow himself an indulgence once in a while—still caking his fingers from snacking earlier. The crinkling of the package made the Piplup squeal in delight, knowing that food was near as the greasy scent reached its tiny nostrils. Dipping two free fingers into the bag, Cyrus pulled out a chip and held it out to the Pokemon. Appreciatively, it nipped at the food, crunching loudly as it ate._

_"Enjoying yourself?" Cyrus snorted._

_"Cheep," the Piplup said._

_Cyrus frowned. "I disagree, small Pokemon. I am not cheap," he said. "Do you know how much something this meager costs these days?"_

_Piplup ignored him and continued nibbling on the chip. Cyrus waited until it finished before placing Piplup back on the floor, kneading the contents of the bag with his fists to grind up the food into more edible pieces for the young Pokemon. He placed the bag upon the ground, the open pouch pointing away from him. Squeaking happily, the girl's companion stuck its head inside the bag and pecked at the crumbs. His guest satiated, Cyrus turned away and glanced outside the window once more._

_He stuck his hand inside the same pocket where the fare had been, fumbling around for his missive that he knew Piplup wouldn't recognize. When he found it, relief surged through his veins, sedating him in a way that no medication could. With a gentle tug, he removed a familiar square of paper, creased exactly four times, having been wrinkled and smoothed out time and again. Cyrus unfolded the paper and gazed at the childish sketch of the girl's favorite Pokemon, so imbecilic for a sixteen-year-old girl, and yet still so wonderful. He'd taken it from his corkboard earlier in the morning with the intention of giving the drawing back to the girl. He presumed that she'd want it back—perchance she even remembered that it existed. It had brought him so much comfort recently—comfort from what, he wasn't sure, but comfort nonetheless. Ease was not something to be wasted._

_Running his finger along the jagged edges of the lines that made up the scrappy Piplup, Cyrus stared at the streak of lead that he'd made in his wake. When he drew the tip away, he saw that his skin was blackened from the heavy graphite. He brought the extremity to his nose and retiringly sniffed the substance. As expected, it smelled stale, quite like a pencil. But another scent lingered, lurking far behind the overpowering stench of the mineral—it was sweet and quiet, almost seductive in its secrecy. It was as personal as the art itself. It was _her _scent._

Bang. _The doors to Cyrus's office closed very loudly, and he was jolted out of his wandering, trouble mind; he hadn't even noticed someone coming in. Hastily, he stuffed the drawing back into his pocket after refolding the paper before turning around to meet his visitor. As he had supposed, it was the girl, dressed in her pastel pink overcoat that she'd owned long before Cyrus had her. He presumed that the rest of her clothes were in the wash and for that, he did not question her attire. What dully devastated him was the fact that her brunette hair was in a French braid, unevenly plaited, but the attempt was still noble. Had Jupiter done it for her?_

_The girl lifted her head and spotted him facing her at the window, the same place they'd stood the night he brought her here to look at the stars. "Oh, hello," she said. "I didn't see you over there. You called for—" She averted her eyes for only a second, but it was long enough to catch the Piplup consuming the rest of Cyrus's victuals on the floor, its head now so far into the potato chip bag that its face was completely concealed. At the sound of the girl entering, it slid out and locked gazes. For a moment, the stillness was tranquil as trainer and Pokemon visually reconnected, until the girl burst out into a cry of elation and dashed toward Piplup._

_"Piplup!" She shouted. "You're okay!" Her Pokemon, euphoric at her appearance, twittered and stumbled to its master, wobbling with its hurried desire to see her again. The girl grabbed her partner and showered it with kisses, fussing over it and wiping off the stains leftover in the aftermath of Piplup's snack with her shirtsleeve. "Oh, thank goodness! I'm so glad! You've even gotten a little fat, silly!"_

_Cyrus cleared his throat, briefly cutting their reunion short. "I thought you might want to see it," he intoned as the starry-eyed pair waved and thrashed together in their ecstasy. He'd never seen the girl so overjoyed—nor had he ever remembered being that way on his own. "It has been doing well. Apparently, one of the grunts was taking care of Piplup, letting it outside and feeding it relatively well."_

_"Relatively?" The girl chortled. "A bit too much, I think." She looked up at Cyrus, her expression now grave with grief. "… I apologize, bothering you more, but do you know what happened to the rest of my Pokemon?"_

_"To my knowledge, they have all been donated," Cyrus replied. "I'm sorry."_

_The girl dropped her head in silent mourning, the Piplup joining her. She did not cry. She didn't complain or act immature—instead, she lamented with muted sorrow. She had grown up considerably during her time here. With a slight but noticeable pang to his chest, Cyrus wanted to discipline himself for containing the properties of what seemed to be emotions toward this girl and her Pokemon friends._

_But he didn't care anymore. He was so tired of being false._

_"What prompted you to bring Piplup back?" The girl asked him. She continued to bustle over the bird's messiness. "I thought you told me something about how prisoners aren't allowed to have Pokemon. I don't think…"_

_Cyrus raised one finger to quiet her, and she immediately fell silent. He'd been debating showing her, but he knew now that everything he had done to counteract her was moot. In the end, she had won. Cyrus refused to give in, but he was already aware that his loss was imminent. Days, weeks, and months had passed, and he was doltish enough to believe that he could stop love. Was he really so arrogant to think that a defeat from something as weak as emotions against a state of soullessness wouldn't be feasible? Saturn warned him. Mars rebelled in his favor. Jupiter calmly let him be overtaken, waiting for him to notice it independently. How much of a fool had he been to ignore their hints, their cautions? In the beginning, all the girl was intended for was what ordinary unintelligent humans called "getting off," but she became more than that—far beyond Cyrus's most unfeasible dreams._

_It was too late to turn back. He had failed._

_And despite his endeavors, he could not be disgruntled._

_Reaching into his pocket, Cyrus took out the sketch again. "This," he began, "was a major part of my decision." The girl seemed puzzled until the Galactic leader unfurled the paper, shaking out the granite dust as it rained as murkily as black snow. He handed it to her, and she studied the illustration warily. She did not seem particularly surprised that Cyrus had a hold of one of her old drawings; in fact, she even appeared pleased._

_"Where did you find this?" She asked him, glancing up from her art. The Piplup pawed eagerly at the picture, knowing that the depiction was made for it by the girl._

_"On the floor in here," Cyrus said, treading carefully, recalling the circumstances under which the art was brought into his possession. "That… day."_

_"Oh." The girl still did not seem shaken. "I remember drawing this then. I carried it with me." She patted the left pocket of her overcoat with the hand that was holding the picture. "I haven't had to wear this much since then, so I've neglected to check the pockets. I guess I thought I'd lost this somewhere."_

_"Your Pokemon isn't very strong," Cyrus said, changing the subject and sidestepping the word "weak." He knew the girl wouldn't take kindly to that. _Since when was he considerate of others? _"I know it won't be a problem or a threat, even under your jurisdiction… so I am trusting you to care for him again. Jupiter won't mind. I've already made all the necessary arrangements."_

_The girl, startled, regarded him with attention. "You trust me?" She queried. "But… I thought you didn't trust anyone."_

_Cyrus stared at his ghostly reflection in the window, the light from the sun nearly blinding his exterior. She was absolutely correct—he didn't trust anyone. He respected Charon and Jupiter and detested Saturn and Mars, but he refused to rely upon any of them for anything except making the obligatory means to achieve his objectives. And he certainly had nothing for his grunts. It was the fault of his parents that he was this way—living a life of disrepute and mistrust, being in eclipsed fear that everyone around him would betray him in one instance or another. In this disgusting, defective world, he thrived on hatred and on deception._

_And yet he was aware that the girl would not do anything to desert him, the hell that he'd compelled her into notwithstanding._

_But wasn't that trust?_

_"You observed once that I appreciate beauty," Cyrus mumbled. The girl cocked her head, nonplussed at this sudden shift, but she played along anyway, nodding self-effacingly. When Cyrus saw the single dip, he went on. "I must say that I agree with you entirely, because you are the most beautiful person I have ever seen."_

_Strides in advance to the girl's slow response to the uncomplicated but remarkable revelation, Cyrus took her round, moon-like face in his hands. He bent down, enchanted fleetingly by the hazy glint in her black eyes before touching their lips together in a kiss that was more chaste than the looks they occasionally exchanged. This action was the purest, most innocent that Cyrus had ever done in all his years on this cursed planet. In all the women that he'd seduced, he'd not kissed a single one. Kissing, to him, was an act of love—something that he held himself high above and found to be an utter waste of time and energy that could be channeled to learning. His parents scantly did so in his youth. To him, if he did not love, then why kiss?_

_Yet he was kissing now. Meaning, in his eyes, that he was in love. Oh, how stupid he was._  
_What a ruse he had lived for so long._

_When he moved away after what seemed to be an eternity, he saw that the girl was crying. Tears poured down her cheeks in great torrents and rivers that menaced to erode permanent lines into her skin from their profuse falling. She made no noise. Her emotion was as quiet as it was graceful—and suddenly, Cyrus realized that her entire prescribed use was a lie. She was indeed the most beautiful person he had ever seen. Though her weeping was wrenching, he thought the passion only made her better. In this flawed world that he wished to destroy and recreate, he found something perfect. Something that could not be tainted, and it was not the girl—it was her purity. She was still as unsullied as the day that she'd arrived._

_He hadn't even been looking._

_Whispering something amid her snuffling to the Piplup, she placed her Pokemon on the floor, and it only looked back once before scurrying behind Cyrus's desk. Cyrus watched it peek around the corner, curious with its snooping eyes. The girl coughed shortly, and the Galactic leader flickered his gaze back to her._

_"Cyrus?" She murmured, her voice husky. "Remember that afternoon when you directed me into your office and talked to me about the conditions of my imprisonment?" She paused. "And how if I need something, I asked the guards first, and if the demand is too steep, I bring it to you?"_

_Cyrus blinked; he was impressed by how she could use such large words after such a moving gesture. "Yes," he said. He, too, sounded throaty, and he didn't know why._

_"I want you to kiss me again," the girl said. A shudder passed through her, her face glistening from the damp tears. "Please. The guards can't fulfill that request."_

_"Dawn." He spoke her name aloud for the very first time in four months, and instantly, he was warmed with the vague notion that everything was going to be all right. She was astonished that he'd addressed her by title instead of by a general noun—it placed her on a different level. Not one beneath him, but beside him. That honor had never been held by any one of his acquaintances or lovers or even family members before. Cyrus had always been alone. Her name was as it portended—upon him, Cyrus was endowed with the recognition that a new start was merited. He'd been stuck in the same chapter for twenty-seven years, and now it was time for him to turn the page. Perhaps the journey to get to this very moment was meant to be grueling and riddled with angst and suspicion, but Cyrus wished that soon, he could turn away from that path and never traverse down its rockiness again. For the quickest of moments Team Galactic didn't matter. His goals didn't matter. What did matter was the fact that this girl—Dawn—was before him. And he was willing to forget just for a while what it was like to be above all others._

_As he leaned down to kiss her again, Cyrus understood that he was hoping._

_It felt good._

It felt.


	24. Part 23

**Yep, we're getting near the end. Thanks for the reviews and faves, you guys; glad to see them coming, even as the story begins to draw to a close! Please keep them up, and you shall all be endowed with virtual cookies.**_  
_

**-Silent-Protagonist  
**

****()()()

_"Prisoner inspection!" The grunt's voice boomed across the cafeteria, rousing every one of the startled, squalid men from their measly noontime meal of carrots and gravy, the same thing Lucas had on the day he first saw Huey break. The boy was sitting at one of the splinter-filled elongated tables, mashing the stew with the side of his fork and mulling over Dawn's blatant rejection of him the day before in the interrogation room. Huey and Rob had finished their meals long ago and were watching him intently, waiting for the forsaken, love and sex-starved young man to take a bite. When the announcement for assessment was called, the straggling pair only sniffed stridently in simultaneous disdain._

_Glowering at the vociferous grunt as the convicts around the trio groaned and shuffled their trays in protest, Huey remarked, "What kind of prisoner inspection is in the middle of the day?"_

_"This one, I guess," Rob shrugged. The blonde stood, following suit with a few other men who wanted to get a head start to begin lining up in front of their cells. "I didn't order it."_

_"No shit," Huey said. "God did."_

_"Or a guy who thinks he's God," Rub interposed._

_"You got that one right." Huey laced his fingers together and stretched his arms out inversely in front of him, cracking his knuckles with an alleviated sigh. He stole a glance at Lucas, who was still making a discolored sea out of his entrée. "What's with you, Diamonds? Didn't get any yesterday?"_

_Lucas didn't reply, his sentience guttered from his encounter with Dawn._

_"Oh, don't mind him," Rob said. "He was probably brutally rejected yesterday and now he's sulking about it."_

_Huey grunted. "Diamonds, ladies don't like it when you come onto them right away," he said. "You gotta give them time. Women prefer to progress slower in a relationship."_

_"But I've known her for my whole life," Lucas moaned forlornly._

_Reaching over, Huey ground the top of Lucas's beret down into his lengthening, greasy brown hair, belching out a rude laugh. "Doesn't mean a thing, kiddo!" he chuckled. "She's still a girl, no matter how you dice it. Old friend or not. Now, c'mon. We gotta get back to our cell. Arceus forbid we end up late." He glanced up at the birdkeeper. "Yo, Rob, remember how much trouble we got in last time there was an inspection? Diamonds wasn't even around for that one yet."_

_"You bet," Rob cackled. "The grunts ripped us both new assholes and we were confined to our cell for a day, giggling about our rebellion like schoolgirls."_

_"The old times were the good times," Huey reminisced. "Seriously, though, kid. Go get rid of your tray so we can get lined up. Two assholes is enough for me. A third might complicate my anatomy."_

_As Rob and Huey managed to motivate Lucas long enough to have him clean up and then melt into the stream of prisoners emptying out to return begrudgingly to their cells, Lucas wished he were dead. What had he done to turn her off so much? She was reciprocating up until the very end—her responses had not been negative. The way she'd brushed against his skin, slid herself into their movements, allowed his hand to travel in places that a girl of her unassuming quality normally would not have. She trusted him as she always had, and that much was evident enough to comfort Lucas even slightly. Only Dawn would have permitted him to touch her body so soon, so intimately; of course, not without hesitations—but what she committed was blatant rebuffing. He was so close to giving her pleasure with love, attachment without pain or such strings. Didn't she want that as much as he did? The way she'd flirted, he most certainly thought so. He could give her what Cyrus could not._

Cyrus! _Lucas had forgotten. How could he? How could he neglect to recall her reaction to speaking his name? Cyrus, and her eyes did not flash with uncertainty. Cyrus, and she did not seem indignant. Even when he did not come up, Lucas knew that he was still there. She thought of him. The biggest question that burrowed its spines into Lucas's psyche was this: Why? Cyrus was the aggressor—a self-centered, greatly immature man who masqueraded his true personality beneath stratum upon stratum of loathing and soullessness. He spoke nothing of emotions and everything of logic, although it did not seem plausible that emotions were the base of irrationality. Perhaps in extreme cases, they were, but Cyrus believed that all feelings were better off banished. How could Dawn think of him? He had done nothing but hurt her, Lucas was sure._

_It wasn't anything he'd done. It was Cyrus. All of it. Her rejection of him, Lucas's imprisonment, his suffering and hers._

_Lucas hated him even more._

_"Line up according to date of arrival before your cell with your corresponding roommates!" The same Galactic grunt from the cafeteria bellowed through the mass of men, waving his pistol around in an exaggerated fashion, as if he dared to shoot anyone who didn't comply—a bluff, Lucas knew, as most of the guards were cowardly and apt to step down from a challenge by any one of these inmates. Huey and Rob made dissatisfied noises, but heeded the grunt's orders and steered Lucas in the direction of the entrance to their cell._

_Once they arrived, the three broke off from the writhing, moving throng and Huey assigned himself the task of arranging them. "This hallway is so damn narrow," he grunted, perusing the concrete walls and ceiling scornfully. "Rob, you know this drill. I'm on the right, you're to the left. Diamonds, you stand right beside Rob. He'll be in the middle."_

_Lucas took his place and watched the other felons dash to their cells, a madcap hurry. He leaned against the rustic, off-yellow bars, feeling their rotting exterior bend beneath his weight. "What is this for, anyway?" He inquired to Huey._

_"Same old stuff you'd expect in any prison that's as twisted as this one," Huey explained. "Authorities come by, pat you down, and if you're found with any drugs or weapons, they kill you. They also briefly check you for physical or mental ailments—you got gout or schizophrenia or the like, you're gone. Helps thin the ranks." He scratched his elbow. "ne of the Commanders does the inspection, and how many are executed depends on the person. If it's the blue-haired dude or the redheaded bitch, the number is neutral. The purple-haired gal is a little more lenient, but that fatass old guy practically shoots you in the head for a mole on your neck. I always hope it's the third one. Pleasantries aside, she's kind of nice."_

_Rob narrowed his eyes and leaned down conspiratorially to Lucas. "They check cells separately later in the week, so you might want to get rid of that lead pipe of yours."_

_"I'll just hide it," Lucas whispered back._

_"Yeah, but if they find it," Huey said, noticing that the trickle of prisoners was lessening, "and they match you to it, don't expect to see your girlfriend again. Now clam it, both of you. They're about to begin."_

_"ATTENTION!" An anonymous voice screamed. Every mumble or cough was put to rest in the long stretch of a dimly-lit corridor. Lucas, Huey, and Rob were close to the front of the very steep line, so the three leaned in slightly to see the entrance of the soul that was to search them that day. There was a large steel door that was padlocked ten times with differing combinations—an egress that Lucas had spotted before, and what he was assumed was the ultimate exit to the jail. Five grunts hurried to the behemoth, working to undo every catch with swift proficiency. When they finished, the door was thrown open—and every single prisoner's breath hitched at the sight of the man behind the door._

_Immediately, Lucas's blood drained. There he was—hair so barren that it was nearly white, powder blue eyes that swept the room so intensely that every man's spirit plummeted into their shoes, and a scowl so deep that Lucas could have tripped in it. The simply crafted black and white uniform with the Galactic insignia sewn upon his left breast told Lucas everything he needed to know. He had not seen this man in four months, and he reviled him for every day he'd spent here._

_Rob's face was white, for even he, of all people, was frightened. "Cyrus," he gasped, bereft of the ability to breathe._

_Cyrus's gaze unmoving, he began to walk down the line with his grunts checking each prisoner as they went, nodding or shaking their heads depending on their analysis. Men either stayed put or were yanked out of the barrier of skin, screaming or silent, reserved to their fate. As he drew closer, Lucas saw Huey's arms flail furtively but severely. "What the fuck!" he hissed under his breath, an exclamation instead of a statement. "What the actual fuck! Akagi never inspects prisoners! He's the head of the organization, for Arceus's sake! This is dirty work! He always has his subordinates do it, and I've been through a ton of these things!"_

_Apparently, Huey had voiced his opposition a bit too loudly, for Cyrus's gaze snapped from his place not five people or so down. "Prisoner," he spat. "Silence. This is your only warning."_

_His caution was a shot in the darkness; a blanket of tension settled over the place, and no one dared to speak further. Snorting, Cyrus nearly returned to the task—until a shift of his eyes caught Lucas's. Abruptly, the air in hell froze over as the identity of Lucas's smoldering diamond stare hit him. The Galactic leader's bent position straightened, his shoulders rolling back. There was no question—Cyrus knew exactly who he was. Perhaps he could see the reflection of the girl he was raping in the boy's face, or perhaps the disgust that Lucas leached piqued him. Whatever the reason, the recognition was obvious. Everyone else in the room sensed it as well—Rob and Huey especially, for when they realized that Lucas and Cyrus had locked, a shiver passed through them._

_"Hey, dumb kiddo, don't challenge him," Rob snarled. "You'll get us all killed."_

_Cyrus leaned over to one of his grunts and muttered something, to which the grunt appeared baffled, but nodded. With that, Cyrus strode over to the three, skipping the few men between them and stopping before the shorter boy. He glared down at Lucas, and his rage was easily met. The pair stood like this for a time, the conflict crackling dryly and Rob and Huey open-mouthed in shock and fear._

_"You," Cyrus said to Lucas in a vengeful tone._

_"Yes," Lucas replied with a smirk. "Me."_

_The grunts paused in their work, slowing to a halt to listen in surreptitiously. One seafoam-haired male was crouched before a chubby criminal, two hands on his knee, immobile in his spot, a solemn statue. The other flipped his vision between his coworker and his boss, lips slightly parted, not knowing what to make of the sudden interaction. Even the prisoners stared—all of them. Not one was turned out of the conversation between the infamous Diamonds and the man who held them to his apocalyptic bosom._

_"How's Dawn?" Lucas asked curtly._

_A blaze of—what? Confusion? Horror? Distress?—flew by Cyrus's countenance, rapidly, but not so much that Lucas didn't notice. "She is perfectly fine," Cyrus growled. "As if it would concern you. You saw her just yesterday."_

_"It does concern me," Lucas said. "I'm her boyfriend, after all. We confirmed that in the interrogation room that you left empty of guards, dumbass."_

_"She mentioned nothing about that," Cyrus said briskly, pleased that Lucas's scathing words did not affect him, "therefore, I am not inclined to believe the words of you, a filthy excuse for a human being."_

_"Why would she?" Lucas taunted. "I don't think she'd tell secrets to the man that was fucking her like she was some kind of animal for his amusement."_

_The entire hallway sucked in a breath concurrently, convinced that Lucas had just signed his death certificate. Rob and Huey exchanged frantic glances and made gesticulations for Lucas to stop, fearing the jeopardy of their own lives as well as their young friend's. A scandalous murmur broke out as a rash would among the remaining prisoners, as some even severed their position to mill about and speak to others. One of the grunts erupted in a scarlet blush at the use of Lucas's harsh language. The kneeling one was much less tolerant of impertinence against his leader and stood, reaching for the gun on his hip holster._

_Cyrus reached up and beckoned for the grunt not to come any closer and hold his fire. "For my amusement?" He grunted, continuing with Lucas. "I'll have you know I've led her to orgasm several times. I'm sure that's more than you've ever done."_

_"Good for her," Lucas said. "I'll bet she faked every one."_

_Laughter at Cyrus's expense inundated the mass of people. Lucas smiled wolfishly and with violent hostility, clenching his fist, feeling the pounding of victory pour through his veins like an electrical surge. Oh, how he wished his pipe were in reach. He'd beat the living hell out of this man, for it thrived inside him, feeding off his insecurities and stemming from his body, a black mist. He didn't care if he was wounded by the protective grunts in the process. The pain would be well worth its price._

_Cyrus did not even flinch. Instead, he pulled his hand up and slapped Lucas across the face, an angry red mark blistering to the surface of the boy's skin. Lucas wrenched back, tasting the metallic tang of blood in his mouth. Drawing back, his expression turned gaunt with fury that made him shakes all over._

_"Did that hurt?" Cyrus mocked._

_"Who's the filthy human being now?" Lucas laughed sinisterly. Lunging at Cyrus, Lucas closed his strong, beefy hands around his throat, pressing his thumbs into the cavity at the base of the Galactic leader's throat. Cyrus gasped and choked, clawing for the oxygen of which his attacked deprived him. Without delay, Lucas watched as the grunts nearby drew their guns and advanced, but seven prisoners knocked them down and disarmed them urgently._

_All of a sudden, the whole prison broke out in a riot of flying fists and catcalls as its people surged forth, hundreds of large, enraged men swelling toward the grunts and the slightly ajar entrance. A pile of muscle descended upon the disabled guards, sounds of punching and kicking drowning out their victims' cries. Rob and Huey, utterly stunned, managed to shake themselves into sanity and bolted into the cell, collecting their wits and apparatus that they could use as makeshift weapons. As they did this, Cyrus, his face turning blue, grabbed Lucas by the forearms and snapped them with his strength, freeing Lucas's chokehold. Lucas cried out in agony and let go just long enough for Cyrus to land a solid blow to his face. Lucas's nose crushed beneath him and he stumbled backward, stars fluttering by in his blackened state._

_Above the roar of the stamping feet and the screams of storming prisoners, Lucas vaguely heard a shout: "Diamonds, here!" He felt a meaty hand plunk a thick cylinder in his open hand, and when his eyesight cleared, he saw that Huey had given him his pipe. With a wicked grin, Lucas blindly swung at Cyrus. The steam valve connected with Cyrus's jaw, a sickening snap piercing the white noise around them. Cyrus hissed in anguish and spit three bloody, uprooted teeth into Lucas's face._

_Lucas poised to swing again, but this time, Cyrus caught the pipe with his hand. He gave an open-lipped grimace to the boy, a crimson, gushing hole where one of his front teeth had been. He forced the end of the pipe into Lucas's stomach with a forceful shove. Lucas, the wind knocked from him, fell back onto the bars of his cell, briefly dazed from the move. When he regained himself, he found that Cyrus had disappeared into the howling crowd, removed from sight. Lucas glanced around hastily, ignoring the dull pain throbbing in his broken and bleeding nose. Within seconds, he spied Cyrus turning the corner out the steel door._

_Without thinking, Lucas raised his pipe and screamed over the noise, "Go!" The prisoners, as if Lucas were a godly force to regard, shouted a war cry and all moved at once toward their freedom and the death of the man they hated most, spilling out in intermittent streams. Lucas could not find the strength to follow them—he waited until every man was gone sans he, Huey, Rob, and the pulp that was leftover from the bodies of what once were Galactic grunts. Then, there was the strangest silence that Lucas had ever heard._

_"… Look what you did now, Diamonds," Rob sighed after a moment or two._

_"I'm going to the women's prison," Huey commented. "I'm pretty sure I know where it is. We need to get them in on this." He smiled at Rob. "Don't blame him, bird boy. He did us all an ounce of good by trying to strangle that loser. Maybe we'll be able to get rid of this place once and for all this time."_

_Rob dipped his head at the boy who stood straight with his nose unrecognizable and his pipe slung behind his back. "You're the one that began this," Rob said. "You're the leader. What shall we do?"_

_"Do whatever you want," Lucas said. "Go free. Fight. I have to find Dawn."_

_Lucas walked out of the prison, away from the life he knew for the last four months and into a world he didn't know anymore._


	25. Part 24

**Aaaargh, what is with Fanfiction and the inability to retain italics? I always have to check and tweak them before submitting a new chapter. Lame. Let's improve the document system, admins. **

**So... tired... haven't slept in days -.- I must finish this story...! Two more chapters plus an epilogue! The one prior to the ep will be enormously long. Urgh.  
**

**As always, I appreciate your faves, follows, and reviews. Thank you all so much for your awesomeness :)  
**

**-Silent-Protagonist  
**

****()()()

Dawn could only sit still and wait.

Where was Cyrus? Jupiter? The guards? Anybody? She by herself in her room, the only other living soul in a close proximity being her Piplup, who was pecking at the lonely white bedspread that Dawn was perched upon. She'd not been called on all day long; Cyrus had informed her that he was inspecting prisoners today but that he would be done by late morning. It was already noon, and there was nothing. Jupiter had brought her breakfast that morning, but she'd ducked out of Dawn's room before the girl could even utter a word, appearing distraught and tormented. Everyone was acting so erratically, and Dawn wished she had an answer as to why.

Sighing, the young trainer clutched at the edges of her pink coat. The clothes from Cyrus were not yet back from the laundry. It had been several days. Were all the grunts doing their loads at the same time? She shook her head and glanced over at Piplup, who was whining in a tone that designated hunger, as it was lunchtime. Dawn didn't have an appetite. The lack of human contact was starving her of not food, but of friendship.

For some reason, she thought of yesterday, and she was consumed with a chill that was not present when she dreamed of Lucas. Cyrus's eyes had not been the dead, barren wasteland that they'd been so many times before—when he was inside her in the very beginning, thrusting against her, so emotionless and so cold that Dawn wished she'd die without that staid, detached face burning into her conscious. Instead, they were animated and pulsating with something that Dawn could not place. It hadn't been wild, unconditional love like she'd seen directed to her so much by Lucas, nor so crazy that Dawn did not think that Cyrus was going insane. He'd watched her the entire time as she'd played with her Piplup and spoke solemnly to him with a sense that made Dawn realize that he believed everything was falling apart—that he, of the world's abhorrent men, was out of control. That was what he desired all along from her, after all—the upper hand, dominance above a girl that he once regarded as a sexual object.

Yet that was changing—everything was changing. Cyrus was no longer the director of her fate, the final scene in her tragic production; it now seemed as if it was he who relied on her to reach out and touch the scarred, lost soul that was hidden beneath the ugly façade that he lived. There was something about the troubled mind of Cyrus that magnetized her, drew her toward him as if she were a thirsty beast to water. In the past, before they had connected on a deeper level, Dawn allowed him to drink from her without hesitation, scared that this was the only path out and that he would provide no leeway for anything else—and if he did, Dawn would stand and run without looking back and reunite with Lucas, like how things were supposed to be.

But now, Dawn could not leave the Galactic leader. The way he'd kissed her yesterday, so vital and imploring, frightened her to a point that she never thought could shake her. He was dependent on her. Cyrus needed her, and Dawn was oddly not bothered by that. She loved Lucas with everything she had and everything she didn't, but this man was not the rapist that he'd once been. Their relationship was not one of master and slave, as he'd intended. The roles were reversed—the kiss had said so, opening up to Dawn and placing the life of its owner in her hands.

And as much as she wished to reject it, she needed Cyrus just as much.

She reached back to touch the French braid in her hair. Jupiter did not do it as well as Cyrus.

The gentle hissing of the electronic door to her room filled the room with its subdued stealth, but was quickly overpowered by the blur of a rushing human form racing inside. Jumping from the unforeseen movement, Dawn grappled for her Piplup and stood up to see, with enormous surprise, Cyrus himself turning to close the door behind him. Dawn opened her stunned mouth, about to say something, when he whirled around and she was met with the most disheveled, beaten appearance of the man she'd ever seen. Blood trailed on his lips as he sneered, wincing in pain, baring his teeth and displaying an enormous gap where one of his teeth was missing. Red handprints were evident on his neck, stinging over his pale flesh.

Dawn was alarmed. "Cyrus!" She cried, rushing over to him. She put down her Piplup, the danger passed, and reached out to touch him softly on the face. "What happened to you? Who did this? Did—"

"Is it true?" He gasped, his voice wounded and raspy.

Blinking, Dawn frowned. "Is what true?" She asked, not understanding his broad question. Pulling the sleeve of her coat over her knuckles, she rubbed a smear of the cherry liquid from his mouth. Cyrus jerked his head back, his nostrils flaring from the searing pain. "Please don't do that," Dawn begged. "I'm just trying to clean you up."

"Are you with the boy?" Cyrus clarified. His cheeks were sunken, exposing his already prominent cheekbones further. "Answer me."

Dawn drew her hand away and gazed up at him with perplexity and a vague impression of terror. What was the right response? If she lied, would he become cross with her? Did he value truth? No, he couldn't. He'd been living a lie up until this point. But there was nothing left to hide anymore—Dawn knew that Cyrus was now emotionally powerless. Too long he had held back against his humanity, and it was beginning to rebel.

"Yes," she said finally, after a hesitation that was too long. She braced herself for a blow, a shout of reproach, or a punishment that she feared would be sexual in nature—but it never came, for Cyrus slumped back instead, appearing abandoned and downhearted at her confession. The panic in his countenance developed into misery, the guise of a man turned down. Dawn was beside herself. His cryptic gestures and corollaries made her as bitter as they did confused.

"Very well," Cyrus swallowed. "I should have known. Come. We must get out of here." He enfolded her hand in his and tugged as he pivoted to leave.

"Wait, wait," Dawn said, yanking away. "What is this all about? Why must we go? What's happening?"

Cyrus turned his head, his manner soft. "You are still a girl of questions," he muttered. "Curiosity is a great thing. So very great."

"Cyrus, what's the matter?" Dawn was growing more and more frustrated with his erratic behavior. "Who hurt you? I thought you were inspecting prisoners."

"I was," Cyrus said. "They rose up while I was… speaking to that friend of yours. Two of my grunts are dead, and the entirety of the men's wing has possibly stormed by now. They will overcome this base within a short hour. I do not have nearly enough manpower on my side to contain a riot that size. I must escape with my Commanders. I called them all on the way here to fetch you." He held out his palms and stared at them blankly, fascinated with their calloused lines and blistered fingers. "Your… he knocked out my teeth with a pipe. It was he who started this, and he will also be the one to end it."

"Cyrus, I can't go," Dawn said quickly. "You know that I can't leave. I have a family. If I ran away with you…"

A reflective pause. "Yes," Cyrus said, drawing out the word as if it were golden. "You're right. How did I not know that? Team Galactic is through. This… everything is over." He threw a look behind his shoulder at Dawn, and she was stricken how vacant he was. "I've lost, Dawn. I can't go back. Diagla, Palika, the shadowy Pokemon… a new world, _my _new world… is it all gone? Yes, it is. There's no more hope. Oh, I had hope with you, girl, so much hope. And now…" Cyrus's bottom lip began to quiver, his suppressed emotions threatening to burst his tight seams. "… I have failed. My plans mean nothing. They've meant nothing for all this time, and I did not notice."

Dawn started to remember that night when Cyrus took her to his office to stargaze with his jacket around her shoulders, marveling at the night sky like reminiscing lovers who had no business being up at that hour. He'd told her almost everything, his dreams of being a physicist as a boy and how if he did not succeed, space and time would vanish to him. Dawn had worried even back then, as they explored beyond an association that was not solely based on one of them, that he would regard himself as a failure. She chose Lucas over him for practical reasons—between a psychopathic, ill-advised madman who clung quietly to every shred of outward charity and a young man her exact age who loved her and wanted nothing but the best for her, the decision was obvious. Cyrus knew that as well, which was why he was not embittered.

But she wasn't sure if he could handle any more solitude.

The door opened again, and Cyrus took one step across the threshold. Dawn endeavored to search for something to say to make him stop, make him stay just long enough to say goodbye. She doubted that once he passed through that doorway completely that she would see him again. Right as he lifted his second foot to move forward, it hit her—and she blurted out without a vacillating thought.

"Never forget my face," she said in the words of Cyrus himself the day they'd truly met, "and I will never forget yours."

Cyrus pulled to a stop. Dawn heard him intake a breath deeper than the fathoms of Lake Verity, and he responded, sounding very far away. "Does that sound like a deal?" He echoed.

Dawn controlled the tears welling up behind her eyes. "Yes, it does," she whispered, a precarious smile spreading over her lips.

"I am in love with you," Cyrus said, surprisingly calm, his back to her still. "I wasn't back then, but I am now."

"I know," Dawn rasped. "Thank you."

Cyrus did not look back. He walked out—not just of the room, but also out of Dawn Hikari's life, a chapter brought to a swift and painless end. As if she were frozen solid and the summer sun thawed her, Dawn's body snapped into motion as she ran out behind him into the hallway of the grunt's quarters, ignoring the cries of her Pokemon. He was gone, disappeared into the yowling frenzy of half-naked, sweating men as they caterwauled and flashed by Dawn in a stampede so fierce that she could not fixate on a single one of their faces. She stood, observing the uprising of proletariats, so out of place in such a colorless, modern facility, not sure of what she was feeling.

Blank. She felt blank. A slate not drawn upon; unlike Cyrus's, which bore the faint sketch of an amateurish Piplup.

"Dawn!" She heard a faint but familiar voice cut through the hollering of the many men interspersed with a few equally untidy women, their area of the prison having been released as well. Dawn turned to the location of it—and saw the flare of the red beret she loved, perched upon the head of a blackened face, one functional diamond eye sparkling with happiness. The boy dropped the lead pipe he was holding, clattering on the ground with force as he broke into a dead sprint toward her.

When Lucas enclosed her in his arms, Dawn began to cry.

()()()

_Faster, he told himself, faster! He had to run—he would be trampled otherwise, and no prisoner would care if he was the one beaten beneath the soles of their bare, dirtied feet. In fact, most might relish in such an action, and might even stop to crush his skull in with their heels. They all wanted Cyrus Akagi dead, for it was him who had imprisoned them all in the first place. His order—and their revenge, their wrath. Perchance they had most of the exits into the forest blocked. Cyrus did not want to risk his life taking a chance that he knew was certainly not in his favor. His Commanders—he prayed that they were still among the living. Hopefully, they were able to get away as he did. Until he was safely able to slip away when the disturbance died down, he could not know for sure._

_Hide—he needed to hide. He turned a corner, distantly aware of the deafening screams of the usurpers not far behind him. A door with a traditional, gleaming knob that glistened with safety greeted Cyrus, not a few steps shy of his position. Making a frenetic dash, he gripped the handle and turned, concealing himself inside the dark, stuffy room. The sterile stench was robust, perhaps the odor of open bleach or paint thinner. Cyrus gagged and slapped a hand over his mouth, trying hard not to breathe. Of course, leave it to him to get stuck in a cleaning closet during a violent inmate revolt. The fumes were just as much of a danger to him as the men._

_Cyrus leaned up against the back of the door, closing his eyes amid the black, exhaling unsteadily through his fingers. He was glad that the girl had not chosen to come with him—the prisoners, after all, under the boy's command, would know that she was one of them and not an outsider to be dismembered and raped. She was safer where she was. Away from him._

_Far, far away from him._

_There was no warning for what followed—inside Cyrus, something snapped audibly, and he disclosed personally that it was where he had bottled his emotions for two decades, stowed for what he'd intended to be forever. But he'd let one seep out_—love, of all the blasted_-and now, none of his chains could conceal them anymore. Cyrus exploded in a discharge of everything that he had never felt in what seemed to have been an eternity—sadness, rage, desperation, joy, hilarity, and ecstasy pounded him with the energy of a hundred fists in unison, causing him to crumple on the floor and burst into tears and inconsolable laughter. A hysterical grin broke his muscle's singular position as his body shook with teardrops that rained from his eyes, an endless stream of cackling hurting the circular bruise where the boy had rammed him in the stomach. Cyrus held his abdomen and curled up into a ball on the floor, sobbing and guffawing until he was so exhausted that he could no more._

Never forget my face, and I shall never forget yours.

_Cyrus closed his eyes as he smiled, the tone of her voice lulling him into sleep, the image of her dark eyes and silky black hair, tied back in a French braid._

I could have done that better.


	26. Part 25

**... I have no excuses for such a late update. But hey, I updated, so everything is okay, right? :D (Puts up rage shield)**

**One more chapter before the epilogue. I'm intending for this the final chapter to be very strong, so it might take me some time to write.  
**

**Thanks again for all the reviews 3 You all make me unspeakably happy. Come here, all of you, and give me a hug.  
**

**-Silent-Protagonist  
**

****()()()

The night was as uproarious as it was calm, but it was only Dawn's heart that roared in conflict like a tropical gale. For once in the four months that Dawn had known this Galactic base, it was still. No voices of gossiping grunts smattered the hallways, no Jupiter hurrying her from location to location supervised, no mercurial guards peeking into her room every so often. This evening was the first that she'd spent alone in a very long time—and, in truth, she really wasn't alone, for Lucas and the other prisoners were here. The insurrection had been successful, and most of the grunts were either slain or disappeared into the forest to escape the persecution, so the base was now free for the victorious men and women to loot and rest in for a while.

She wondered if they'd captured Cyrus or not. She wondered if he was finally liberated, unbound from his burdens, either in life or death.

With a sigh that seemed heavier than her own body, Dawn sunk back against Cyrus's old desk as she stared out the familiar looming windows that made up the north wall of his ransacked office. The rampaging captives had blown through here hours ago, smashing his computers and tearing his informational texts to shreds, ripping the carpet and throwing stones through the glass. Now, in the serene mess that was made of the place—blankets of soggy papers and machine parts ground into the dust—Dawn could not assuage herself. She painfully reminisced instead as she gazed out the cracked and shattered panes, trying hard to sidestep the bits of broken shards that littered the floor. A breeze slunk through the ruined barrier between her and the outside world, touching her cheek with natural, inanimate concern.

The stars twinkled, a sign that all was right—yet an indication to Dawn that nothing was. To her, these celestial bodies meant something much different. They symbolized a shifting force that was as brilliant as the human spirit. They meant finality. And these broken windows revealed to her that whatever she had felt with the Galactic leader was gone. That night with his jacket about her, gazing upon these very same stars was nothing more than a memory to let go.

"Dawn?" The large double doors swung open in sync with the gentle calling of her name, light from the battered hall streaming in and filling the black, soulless room with a beam of brightness that Dawn found unwelcome. Behind the voice came the awkward pattering of webbed feet and an anxious chattering that sycophantic in its worry. Recognizing the sound of her Piplup, she turned around to see the blue shadow of her Pokemon hobble inside. Standing behind it was the boy she didn't really want to see at the moment—Lucas Kouki, his eye and nose bandaged, but still smiling at her with overwhelming love. He was wearing the same clothes that they'd been captured in four months prior, and that attire was nothing but scraps on his strong frame. A bit of blood trailed his skin and matted in his brown hair, but otherwise, he appeared in fine shape.

Dawn wanted to crawl under Cyrus's desk, back into the easy emotionless arms that she'd known before. Instead, she knelt to allow Piplup to embrace her, smiling wanly to accept its unconditional joy at discovering her. Dawn bit her lip as she heard Lucas's heavier footsteps make their way toward her, up the few levels of stair-stepped carpet to the platform of ground before the once radiant, towering windows, now disintegrated and smashed into dust below her small feet.

"Piplup was running around and making noises in the mess hall," Lucas reported. "I figured that it missed you. I tried to tell it that you wanted some time for yourself, but it was inconsolable. I hope you don't mind. Rob and Huey were trying to cook it."  
Shaking her head, Dawn buried her face into her Pokemon's soft down. She'd met Lucas's roguish friends after the prison riot had begun to calm, and Lucas brought her to the former dining room to meet them and receive first aid. She thought well of both of them and respected their care with her lover, but did not try to befriend them. She should have been relieved that the felons under Galactic custody rose up and freed her from her burdensome responsibility.

Yet all she saw around her was the shell of a place that had come to protect her.

"Lucas," she mumbled, muted by the barrier of her Piplup's feathers. "I need to come clean."

When she lifted her head from her delicately tittering Pokemon, she noticed that he was standing above her with a confused frown painting his trodden but handsome features. He extended a hand to her, and she aversely took it, getting to her feet and holding Piplup close to her with one hand. "Come clean about what?" Lucas inquired. "What did you do wrong? If this is about Cyrus, I know everything."

Dawn was startled at that revelation. She gave him an incredulous look, her jaw dropped slightly. "How?" She asked. "You were down in that basement prison for months. How did you know anything that was going on up here?"

"Gossip," Lucas admitted. "The prisoners were a rumor mill. I heard a lot of hearsay going around about… Cyrus and his… uh, you. Most of it was started by the guards." Dawn's lover shuffled his feet and his vision was momentarily downcast, sheepish and ashamed at his knowledge of relatively private information. His profile was adumbrated by the slinking darkness, so Dawn could not read his expression. "And when we met in the interrogation room… I could see his control in your face and in the way you moved. I knew fairly early on. It… it scared me, to see you owned by another man." His diamond eyes went limpid with sorrow. "Owned, like you were an object and not a human being. It made me restless to get you away from him."

Dawn's stomach nearly gave way at Lucas's interpretation of their relationship. _You don't understand. That's only how it was in the beginning. Only then._"I can take care of myself," Dawn said. "I was coping fairly well." She audibly swallowed at that, the first time in Cyrus's bedroom passing by in her recollection, feeling herself heat up from its intensity.

"I know you can," Lucas said amusedly, reaching up to gingerly touch Dawn's French braid, as if it were a piece of art. "I was worried about you, that's all. I wanted to be your first, you know. The fact that Cyrus took your innocence away from you so violently made me angry." He stroked her firm plaits of hair. "I like your hair this way. Did you experiment with hairstyles?"

Arching her hand back, Dawn inadvertently tugged at the end of her braid. "I'm sorry," she said apologetically. "For not trying to help you faster. I was trying. It was just…" Her voice trailed off into nothingness. She _had_ been attempting to help Lucas, but when had that become a lesser priority? _No, what am I saying? Lucas was always on my mind. Always._

Was that right?

"Baby," Lucas murmured soothingly, twisting a lanky forearm around her waist and pulling her into his ample scope with his unending love. "It wasn't your fault. Stop blaming yourself. You didn't choose to end up performing favors for that bastard. Cyrus is the culpable party. You did what you did to save my life, and I'm forever grateful to you for that. Even if the means by which you had to do it would have been my last choice." The burly young man pecked each one of Dawn's closed eyelids amorously, not noticing the sole tear that slipped out of her left eye. "I have a confession of my own to make. For a while, I thought you were in love with him, until I met him down in the prison during inspection this morning. But the way you showed affection to me… it erased any of those qualms." He drew away and smiled poignantly at her, caressing the back of her head with his empty hand. "_I'm_sorry for thinking such a preposterous thing."

Dawn was slammed immediately by every single memory that made her even remotely happy in the presence of the former Galactic leader, her traitorous conscience betraying her believably solid tenderness for Lucas. She remembered Cyrus pulling roughly at her hair to perfect the original braid that spurned Dawn to copy the hairstyle and Cyrus's surprisingly warm hand in hers as he sat hesitantly on her bedspread with the advent of a nightmare. She was shaken by the imprint of his hand on her naked side and his friendly semblance as he interacted with her Piplup. And, most of all, the feeling of his lips on hers, pressing earnestly, as if they would never see each other again.

How had he known? That was their second-to-last meeting. Perhaps he hadn't known at all. Perhaps he felt that it was time for his shell to break and for the little boy holding the perfect math grade to surface, smiling and excited to take on the world as a challenge and not as a weight. They could have had weeks, months, years left together, and Dawn was certain that he would have kissed her anyway, for he'd been in love with her. He'd even said it himself in that same stoic tone to which she was so accustomed.

_I am in love with you._

"No," Dawn said carefully after many minutes of silence. "No, I have never loved him."

_I wasn't back then, but I am now._

She slid her hands beneath Lucas's shirt, feeling the muscles that he'd built and standing on her toes to whisper in his ear for him to take her, love her in the way that he'd always desired. He was shocked—"Here?" Now? In this place?"—but he did, dismissing Piplup to Rob and Huey to give he and Dawn the privacy they so desperately needed. He spread her out on the floor where no shards warned to cut them and made love to her gently, with the sensitivity of a man made of glass. Fraught, Dawn tried to feel pleasure, but she was desolate, and not because of Lucas's inexperience or clumsiness. It was simply because she'd permitted a vast lie to fall upon her and become another piece of straw that would someday break her back.

Accumulate, like her own falling snow.

_Oh, Cyrus. I love you. I love you so much._

__()()()

Dawn felt the stars watching them as they moved together as one, and when they were finished, she was as sad as they were.


	27. Part 26

**I WROTE 5,000 WORDS TODAY, WHAT THE EFF.  
**

**Cyrus's grandfather is real, yo. No OC here. He's exclusive in Platinum on Route 228. No kiddin'. As for his name, that was of my own creation. Can't have everything, can we?  
**

**Only the epilogue left. I'll do my proper thank-yous then.  
**

**You are all so wonderful :3 If I could meet you all, readers and reviewers, I would make you mass loads of cookies. And then force-feed you them all, because a good cookie is not a wasted cookie. And give you all hugs, too, to top it off.  
**

**This is nearly over, so bear with me! Thank you all again for your support!  
**

**-Silent-Protagonist  
**

****()()()

**Two years later.**

Twinleaf Town was pretty in the winter, just as wonderful as it was when Dawn was a little girl—that was one thing about the scenic charm of Sinnoh. It never really changed too much and still held the same bookish, fairy tale loveliness that Dawn remembered growing up with. She never wanted to leave this place again. It was here that she was born, deep in the recesses of the rowan trees, climbing up them in the balmy summertime with Lucas and plucking leaves to weave into crowns and chains—and it was here that she decided to remain. Her Pokemon journey was long over with. She had never achieved her wish to defeat the Elite Four, though she challenged Cynthia at seventeen and lost with a brand-new team. Piplup was the only survivor of her time with Team Galactic, and he evolved quickly when Dawn and Lucas went home. She'd lost miserably, and it was then that she chose to make her way back home. For years, ever since she was a little girl, all she'd wanted was to be a hero.

And she understood now that fate had not dealt her the hands of a champion. She was just another woman, living a quiet life, away from crippling fame and lavish fortune. Not too momentous, but yet not so insignificant that she could not move the face of someone's life.

Dawn was eighteen, but still living at home with her aging mother. For now, she had no desire to move out, as she felt that her responsibility lied with family now that she was old enough to care for them. She'd released her Pokemon months ago, and now all that remained with her was Empoleon, a graduated monolith of the gawky baby he once was. Empoleon kept things in order and watched her mother—who was now developing the beginning stages of dementia—while she was away in nearby Sandgem Town at her job as a research assistant to Professor Rowan. She worked alongside Lucas, who snuck her into the supply closet during breaks to feel her in the dark.

Lucas had grown independent from his time in the prison and moved out of his childhood home in Twinleaf and owned an apartment in Sandgem not far away from the beach, the place where they'd gone swimming in their younger years. He was the same rugged, matured young man that emerged from Galactic incarceration, with the muscles that he continued to keep polished and a voice that had become deep and seductive. His brunette hair was longer than before, once a kept trim but now shaggy and extending as a transparent veil over his grey eyes, hidden beneath a larger size of his signature red beret that Dawn bought him for his seventeenth birthday. Of course, he still smoked, jokingly telling Dawn that it made him look trendy. Dawn was concerned for his health, but she knew that she could do nothing to corrupt the Diamonds that Rob and Huey had nurtured. Deep in Lucas's heart, he thought he was forever an inmate, profoundly scarred by his months in that accursed jail.

Sometimes, Dawn would leave Empoleon in charge of her mother—who was so ill by the time that she and Lucas had been captured by Team Galactic two years ago that she didn't even realize her daughter was missing—and go visit him for a day if they happened to be off work. They would frolic in the sand and reminisce by day and be enraptured with each other by night, going to bed early and not ceasing to pull away until the hours of the morning. Lucas loved being with her, clothed or making love, and Dawn knew that she was lying to him—but, to her, it was better to live a deception than owning up to the horrible truth that plagued her with the intensity of a disease.

She was not in love with Lucas, as he had been and still passionately was. Another man had her heart, and such foolishness was hers to blame.

Sometimes, in the evenings, either while her mother and Empoleon were asleep or if Lucas was otherwise preoccupied, Dawn would step outside to look at the stars. If there was something that was static despite the strife of the world they oversaw, it was them—twinkling and smiling down at her with the old light that Dawn hoped would never fade away. She was a woman now, and not the child that she was two years ago—she was taller, more buxom, and her black hair easily stretched on beyond her waist. She wore her hair back more in the form of a French braid, a technique that she'd taught Empoleon, for her mother could do it no more. Surprisingly, Lucas found it attractive and often begged her to leave her mane in such tied tresses whenever she was over. Dawn did so, not only to appease him but her troubled soul as well.

She didn't know if Cyrus was alive, or even if any of his Commanders had managed to escape the prison riot that left bloodshed in its wake. To this very day, she worried about Jupiter, praying that at least she walked among the living. The base was no more—whether or not Team Galactic still existed was beyond her. Dawn remained in mystery, revolving around questions that could never be solved.

As she stared back at the gentle stars, she wished, like the child she still was in spirit.

()()()

Normally, Route 228 was scourged by constant sandstorms, untamed winds that blew madly in the ears of passerby and kicked up dust to the extremity that one could not see one's hand in front of them. It was a hardy area, not far before the Battle Frontier, and served as a final challenge to elite battlers that dared to face the Brains that Dawn had never met, but heard much about. The weather hazard of the place left many trainers too dazed to continue on, a death trap of Sinnoh that threatened their lives at every turn. But as for those who could brave the blackened sky and grainy wasteland, they were honored as serious men and women, given almost as much reverence as those who were able to confront the Elite Four.

But, on this day, the air was strangely clear of the usual grime and swirling earth, and the blue afternoon sky was visible high above Dawn as she walked alone about the route, empty and interestingly devoid of trainers. Perhaps the clarity daunted the sincere ones, as the sandstorm posed a trial that excited those on their way to the Frontier. For that reason, they stayed away, the sudden ease of the Route making them feel inadequate. Any good trainer would simply not walk up to the Battle Frontier—they needed to earn their place.

The summer sun beat down as a melody on Dawn's white-clad back, the light colors of her outfit keeping her cool and the air around her not quite as stuffy and musky. A mirage of rippling land appeared before her with the illusion of water as she walked by the few houses that populated the Route, one hand on her knapsack to keep it steady from the occasional rogue breeze that slipped through the staid calm. Inside was a bottle of water and a letter to one of the Frontier Brains from Professor Rowan. She'd been given the task of hand-delivering the note because of Rowan's fear of the sandstorms, for they dealt a blow of damage to Flying-type Pokemon that were often assigned to transporting goods in the air above Sinnoh. Gladly, Dawn accepted the chore, silently grateful for a few hours away from the enclosed laboratory and Lucas's incessant "accidental" brushings against places like her legs or her breasts. She needed to get away, and this brief errand was just the undertaking she required.

She'd borrowed Lucas's beloved Staraptor to get this far, but had put it back into its Pokeball for no reason other than to walk aimlessly without another living being interrupting her wandering thoughts. Staraptor could effortlessly navigate the skies nearby the Battle Frontier thanks to the absence of the dust storms, but Dawn wanted some time to herself. As she trudged on the very long path toward the front gate of the Frontier, she daydreamed, but really not about anything at all—not about Lucas, not about her job, and certainly not about Cyrus.

Certainly not at all.

At one point, she passed by a quaint home that sat far south of the Battle Frontier, pretty with its purple roof and white shutters. It was an unusual combination, considering the ordinary state of the climate here, and Dawn was amazed to see that the bright, vivid colors of the house seemed brand-new and unaffected by the sandstorms. She slowed to admire the residence as she passed, and as she did, she spotted movement along the north side of the house, somewhat obscured by the shade cast by the rays of sunlight. An elderly man was cast over what appeared to be a thriving vegetable garden, brandishing a watering can from his gnarled, leathery hand. He paused in his work when Dawn stopped completely to observe him, stunned to see someone of his age living in such a hazardous area. Once he finished watering his peas, he set down the rustic metal can beside his stooped feet and glanced up at Dawn, staring at her curiously with his glimmering blue eyes, sparkling with the vitality of someone much younger. Suddenly, he smiled warmly, running a dirt-caked hand through his white hair and making an effort to stand up straight, though his back was hunched.

"Hello," he said evenly, as Dawn was not far away from him on the road. "You don't look like a trainer to me. You're far too pretty. What are you doing here on such a fine day?"

Dawn balked. Why was she so drawn to this old man? She'd never met him before in her life; he was another stranger, albeit an intriguing one. "I'm delivering a letter to a Frontier Brain," she explained. "I'm an aide from Professor Rowan's lab in Sandgem Town."

"I see," he said, the air whistling between his loose, cracking dentures as he exhaled. The consistent noise made him sound merry. "You came here from that far away? I hope you didn't walk. I'd be dead by now if I were you. This heat is really something."

"No, I flew on a Pokemon," Dawn said. "Erm, I have a deadline, I think I might have to get—"

"You must be tired, young lady," the man said hoarsely, grunting as he picked up the watering can and dumped its contents on the soulful garden. "Why don't you join me for a glass of iced tea? I just made a fresh brew this morning. Working out in the garden makes me parched, and I'm sure that you are, too, from being on your feet for so long."  
Dawn shook her head, unsure if she should trust this unfamiliar person. She could easily fend him off, as she was young and spry while he was decrepit and rickety, but she still tried to be on her guard at all times. "No, you really don't have to invite me in," Dawn said. "I have to get this parcel delivered right away."

"Oh, believe me, Rowan won't mind if you stopped by and sit down for a little while," the old man said, his grin widening at her haste. "He and I grew up together. We stay in contact as much as possible, especially since he's not as busy as he lets on, the fogey. I can even give him a call for you if you need."

Inhaling deeply, Dawn pondered with bated breath. She was very thirsty—her bottle of water had become lukewarm hours ago, and the intermittent swigs that she took was not enough to quench her cottony mouth and throat. For health and courtesy purposes, the proper thing to do was to have a social visit with this newfound elder and hydrate herself. Rowan would surely understand, wouldn't he? Even when the old man called, if he really wasn't lying about knowing the distinguished Professor for sexual favors?

Dawn sighed. She didn't take enough risks these days.

"Sure," she said eventually. "I'll have some tea with you. And… no, you needn't call the Professor. I'll tell him I got caught in some air turbulence on the way there."

The old man's semblance cheered even more. "Wonderful," he said. He hobbled toward the front door, and Dawn strayed from her position and followed him to the entrance of the plum house. She managed to reach the destination before he did, and she held open the door for him. Gleefully, the elder beamed at her. "I never have visitors as polite as you," he said, walking inside the cool interior of the house. Still indisposed, Dawn went in after him. The house was small but cozy, sparsely furnished, but just enough to have a two-chair dining set in the center of the main room, which was as purple as the shack's roof. Two separate oak doors were placed at the west end of the home, and the old man shuffled into one, where Dawn presumed the kitchen was. A couch, laid out with pillows and blankets, sat in one dusty, lonely corner, and she realized with a start that this man lived in such poverty that he did not even have a private bedroom.

Pitying this stranger, Dawn made her way to one of the chairs that was pulled up to the table and sat down, marveling at the simplicity of the decoration. Even Lucas's apartment was more profligate than this, and they didn't make much combined. She glanced over at the sole pair of doors in the square room, hoping that the other was a bathroom. He deserved at least that much.

Moments later, the old man burst through the kitchen door, carrying a tray with two glasses of iced tea, a black blend that mingled darkly with the cubes of ice. Approaching the table, he set the dish down and handed Dawn one, which she took gratefully, but did not drink immediately, fearing that hers was drugged. "That vegetable garden of mine works well, even in a sandstorm," the old man commented, taking a sip of his tea. "The wind tends to blow out of the south here, so the garden is well-protected by the house in the instance of such conditions. And don't worry, you're not imposing on me. I greet trainers and bring them in for tea all the time. The journey to the Battle Frontier is a long one on foot."

Dawn absently nodded, setting down her glass in front of her. She hadn't heard about large numbers of missing trainers. Maybe he wasn't a murderer?

"Rowan told me a few weeks ago that he had a young couple working for him, but I didn't know he was sending you up here for an errand," he continued. "You are quite truly the epitome of young. I thought when he said that, he meant a man and woman in their late twenties. Perhaps my perception of things is getting worse as I age." He chuckled and directed a question toward Dawn. "What might your name be, young lady?"

Her brow furrowing, Dawn decided to trust him, as there was no way he would be aware of Lucas without having some kind of rapport with Rowan. "Dawn," she introduced. "Dawn Hikari."

The prattle, the generous fortitude in the room went still, as if waiting for something else to happen. The man leaned forward seriously, his temple drawn and his tranquil, powder blue eyes studying her, as if waiting for a punch line of some sort. For the first time, it hit her that his irises were such a shade—he reminded her of a certain man that had once been in her life in his appearance, and that made her want to weep.

"Dawn Hikari?" The man whispered. His voice was reduced to a croak, reminiscent of him growing a hundred years older than he was now, close to death. "Dark hair, dark eyes… it can't be you. Are you sure that's your name? Did Cyrus send you here to pull my leg?"

Instantly, that name—_Cyrus!_—slammed into Dawn with the weight and force of a freight train, and she was overwhelmed by memories that she'd been able to repress up until this point, but never banish completely. She was flooded with images of the Galactic base when it wasn't a crumbling, abandoned structure in what Dawn now knew to be the Eterna Forest, with its protracted and winding corridors and its colorless color scheme. Back when the doors to Cyrus's office were still large and majestic, a place of horror and disgust transforming itself into an oasis of peace and harmony. How strange. How strange, indeed—this man knew Professor Rowan, so how did he know Cyrus? He was acquainted with the unrequited intellectual of the region, and Cyrus was by far its most notorious.

And… she believed he was _dead._

"N-No," she murmured. "I-I'm pretty sure that's my name. How do you know Cyrus?"  
The old man's expression softened as he leaned back into his chair, the base creaking loudly as his mass pressed against the fragmenting wood. "You are the real Dawn," he muttered. "If you weren't, you'd have no clue who I was talking about. Dawn, I've got something to tell you, and please don't be alarmed when I do. I've wanted to meet you for a very long time now, and I'm glad that fate brought us together like this." He took a deep breath, preparing to drop a missive from which Dawn would never recover. "My name is Joseph Akagi. I'm Cyrus's grandfather. His father is my son."

"Akagi," Dawn said to herself. Cyrus words were a babbling brook in Dawn's hazy thoughts, spilling over the dry rocks that were left unconnected in her mind. _When I was a child, I often stayed afternoons and evenings at my grandfather's house. My older cousins sometimes came by to visit, and only one of them was male. The others taught me how to braid their hair because they didn't trust their sisters to do it for them._This grandfather of Cyrus wasn't just a myth. Here she was, sitting right across from him at his dinner table, and in his own home. He was a very real person, borne of flesh and blood and the same eyes that graced his grandson.

Joseph Akagi was here. And he spoke as if he had answers.

"Cyrus is alive," Joseph told her, tracing the condensed rim of his tea glass, skirting the chunks of melting ice and wiping away summer tears. "He is very much alive, and he is well. As you would expect, he's on the run from authorities. He comes to visit me every once in a while—twice every six months or so, I would say. This is his haven, a place preserved in time that he remembers as being cathartic to him as a boy, and he is welcome back here anytime. Truthfully, when he founded this Team Galactic nonsense, I never thought I would see him again. But I do, and it's all thanks to you." He flashed her an open-mouthed smile as his dentures whistled again. "Cyrus talks about you all the time, you know. The minute he walks in, the first thing out of his mouth is something about you or inquiring about your well-being. I can't get him to shut up. He smiles and laughs, cracks jokes and mourns when it's appropriate. He ceased to have emotions when he was seven—I haven't seen him so happy in twenty years, Dawn. Twenty whole years."

Dawn tried to picture that in her head, but she simply could not. Cyrus laughing? Being joyous? Openly exposing the sentience that he'd let simmer and fester deep inside him for so long? She'd spent too much time with him exactly the opposite. "Really?" As verbose as Joseph Akagi was, she couldn't manage much else. She was too shocked by this overload of information.

"He's in love with you, Dawn," the old man chortled. "I've not seen someone as lighthearted as that since I was courting my late wife, and that was ages ago. Love changes a man, much more than it does a woman. When a man is sure that he's infatuated with a girl, he's the happiest soul in existence, and even if a relationship with the woman he desires is impossible, he's still an ecstatic mess."

Briefly, Dawn thought back to Lucas, and realized that Joseph was right. "Where is Cyrus now?" She inquired.

"Oh, who knows?" Joseph mused. "Long gone. It's been a while since he last came by. Somewhere underground in Sinnoh, I presume. Or he might be in Kanto or Johto, where he can be invisible. He sees me when he needs to, and I count that as a blessing. And if a trainer happens to drop by while he's here, I just hide him in the bathroom." Cyrus's grandfather snickered at his sneakiness, and Dawn felt oddly glad that he had a restroom.

"Is… is Cyrus's father your only son?" Dawn asked, trying to change the subject to something she was equally inquisitive about.

"If you mean to ask if I had daughters as well, no, my wife gave me nothing but a brood of boys," Joseph Akagi reminisced, smiling wistfully as he took a mouthful of his tea. At this point, Dawn found it suit to copy him, the fear of her drink being spiked long disappeared. "Cyrus's father, Samuel, was my youngest. He had two older brothers before him, and they're both living modest lives with their own families in other regions. That's where Cyrus's female cousins come from. The lady gene seemed to have skipped Samuel's generation." His oceanic eyes quivered sensitively, the ache of recollection taking its toll. "My wife and I—she passed away not long after Samuel married, by the way—were very proud of our first two. They were wonderful boys, well-behaved and polite. Manners that every parent dreamed of, you know? We had absolutely no problem with them. But… Samuel was a different story. He was rebellious, but not in the fashion that you might think. Instead of drinking or staying out at night, he was locked away in his bedroom, studying to be the region's greatest academic. And because of that, he lost his ability to communicate socially with people. The fact that he was wed was a miracle to us."

Joseph took a longer gulp this time, as if trying to palliate himself for what would follow. "It wasn't that Samuel was unattractive," he continued, looking more and more exhausted as he went, "it was that he was so antisocial that I believed he would never leave our house as an independent adult. But the moment he turned eighteen, he went to Veilstone City to attend a nuclear physics conference, and he met the woman that would become his wife. Equally as emotionless and proper, so strict that she dared to order me around. They courted for five months and then were married. It was the stiffest wedding I've ever been to." He laughed nervously before falling serious again. "Immediately, I knew that Samuel and his wife would be terrible parents. They simply weren't sentient enough to do the job well. I tried to convince them not to have children, but my son shot me down, saying that 'the intelligent must breed.' He treated sex and intimacy as if it were a chore, a duty to be done for the human race. And sure enough, through that very action, Cyrus was born a year into their marriage.

"At first, he was a normal boy. Playing with other children on the playground, running around this very house with his cousins and uncles, who did their best to be surrogate fathers to him. He was extremely bright, never missing an educational beat, and I was so proud of him for honing his skills with such enthusiasm. But his parents weren't, and ultimately, it was their praise he craved." Joseph paused and bowed his head. "By the time he was eight, Cyrus fully banished his own feelings. I struggled to help him see differently, that this world is so much more enjoyable with a life rich in passion, but he didn't believe me. As he grew into a teenager and a young adult, he went out with girls, but I could tell that he hated it. I'm sure Cyrus did so only to quell his raging adolescent hormones. By the time he was twenty-one, he'd ignoring trying to make friend altogether. And then he evolved into the Galactic leader you knew, and the rest is clockwork to you."

Dawn was shaken by this tale, finally being revealed the state of Cyrus's family life that he'd kept hidden so well from her. "Are his parents still alive?" She asked carefully. If Joseph Akagi was, then surely Samuel and his wife were.

"Yes," Joseph confirmed. "I haven't heard from them in years, and I doubt Cyrus rekindled a relationship with them. There was so much strife in that household that I'm positive he does not want to relive that agony. I think they live somewhere around Jubilife City, though I could be wrong."

A chill traveled up Dawn's spine. Jubilife wasn't far away from Sandgem.

"I'm sorry to depress you with that sad story," Joseph Akagi groaned, draining the last droplets of his tea. Dawn flickered her gaze down and noticed that her glass was cleared as well. "But such is life. If there were no hardships, then what kind of human beings would we be? Snobbish, privileged ones. I tend to see the glass half full—" He gesticulated to his empty cup. "—Unlike this one, but that's because I was thirsty." With a short smile, Joseph regarded Dawn with adoration. "I tell myself every day that I should have reached out to Cyrus, but if I did, he would have never met you. You taught him a lesson that I couldn't. You have made him happy beyond all understanding, and for that, I love you as if you were my own granddaughter. I know that sounds forward, as I have only met you today, but I feel like I've known you for a very long time."

Dawn bit back a flow of bitter tears and clutched at the edges of her skirt, dipping her head to conceal her sadness. Why did she have to come here? Why did she accept this anonymous old man's invitation? Would things have been better if she'd gone on knowing nothing about this reborn Cyrus that she'd yet to understand? Then again, if she hadn't, she would continue living a lie that no one deserved, especially not Lucas, and especially not her. It was happenstance that Professor Rowan had sent her here, unless he knew something that she didn't. That was unlikely, as Rowan knew nothing of hers and Lucas's time captured by Team Galactic. To most citizens of Sandgem and Twinleaf, they'd merely been out of reach on their respective Pokemon journeys, and no one bothered to contact them.

She, like Cyrus, felt that she was a failure. But was failure really as bad as it seemed?

There was a smacking noise, and Dawn looked up to see that Joseph had slapped himself on the forehead. "I'm so silly, how could I forget?" He said. "Cyrus wrote you a letter that he wanted me to give to you if I met you, since he doesn't know your address. It's on the kitchen counter beside the refrigerator. I'll go get it." Joseph Akagi toiled to stand up again, his old body not as swift as Dawn's.

Worried not to burden him, Dawn stood up quickly. "I can get it," she said before he could protest. "It's no problem at all. I'll even clean up the tea glasses." She reached for their dishes and placed them on the tray, making her way over to the kitchen while Joseph guffawed cheerily all the way.

"Guests mustn't clean up," he said, "not for an old man like me."

"It's minor repayment for what you told me," Dawn reassured him. "The least I can do." She pushed through the scraping door, barely hanging on its hinges, into the tiniest kitchen that she'd ever seen. It was thinner than most hallways she'd been in (excluding those of the Galactic base, which seemed miles wide), with barely enough room to walk between the wall and the counters and appliances to the left. It did not match the décor of the rest of the house—instead, it was a brilliant yet unsoiled white, everything from the plastic sink to the trash can that sat beside the refrigerator. Dawn slithered her way through the compact room, placing the serving plate in the sink, knowing that Joseph would probably not allow her to do dishes. Her attention shifted to the countertop near the refrigerator—where, just as Joseph had said, there was an envelope.

Craning her arm as far as she could to grab the note, Dawn examined the cover of the sealed card. It read nothing but "Dawn" in the same straightforward script that she recognized as Cyrus's, exactly how he'd written on the letter he'd taped to the duffel bag containing new clothes so many months ago. If there was one thing that was stalwart in its ability to stay uniform, it was his handwriting. Flipping the card over, she poked one finger through the fastened flap, hesitant but readying herself. As she collected her wits, Dawn's sight unintentionally moved to the refrigerator, an ancient but reliable model, as pallid as the rest of the room.

On its door, there was a shaky, crude drawing of a Piplup, attached with a magnet in each corner.

_I will not cry._


	28. Epilogue

**I'm... I'm just not going to say anything except thank you. Thank you all. I am so incredibly grateful to each and every one of you for reading this, long as it was. It hit 108 pages, which is actually about 188 pages shorter than some things I've written, but it was well worth the short time that I did spend on it.  
**

**You make my life, readers. Keep up the good work.  
**

**-Silent-Protagonist  
**

**EDIT: Okay, so I've gotten comments on both Deviantart and here, asking me two questions: 1. Did you mean for the epilogue to lack closure and leave the audience hanging? Answer: Yes, that is my entire intention. This is a story where very little is resolved, and I want you guys as the readers to decide for yourselves what happens afterward. Does Dawn break up with Lucas and search for Cyrus, or does she remain in her old life? That's up to you.  
**

**Which brings me to the second question: Is there going to be a sequel (or even just a follow-up)? Answer: Most likely, no. I don't like writing sequels, as they are often awful and just muddle the storyline more. However, I might be writing Akatsukishipping oneshots in the future that *may* address Dawn and Cyrus's relationship later on as an extension of this story, so keep an eye out.  
**

**I'm going to be starting a new long story soon; I hope you read that one as well! Thanks for the support, again and again!  
**

()()()

_Dawn,_

_I don't know if this letter will ever reach you. My grandfather is a very old man, and he gets older as the days pass. His age has spiraled him into a deep state of senility, and he might forget to give this to you if he ever does cross paths with you. Yet he is someone that I respect with every inch of my heart; without him, I would surely have no emotions at all._

_I can't write for long; the authorities are after me, and I must constantly be on the move. Someday, I hope my case can be absolved and the horrible reputation I have built washed away. I'd like to be left with a clean slate from which I can start over, but perhaps that's not possible any longer. Maybe I had a chance when I was younger, before I started Team Galactic and sucked so many people into my web of lies and deceit. I'd be a different man now if I'd stopped to think about what I was doing instead of blindly rushing into a strife-filled existence with a bleak future and an even more ruined past. I can't tell you where I'm at, Dawn, or where I'm going to be, because I don't want to jeopardize you further than I already have. You've already been exposed to much danger by my hand, and I wish for that to cease, at the very least._

_All my Commanders got out alive, thank Arceus. I was surprised to find that I was worried about them, all of them, despite my usual attitude towards their ineptness. Charon disappeared into the woods; I wasn't able to rendezvous with him, and I do not know what has become of this right hand. He was a valuable member of my hierarchy, and I didn't understand how much I appreciated his intelligence until he was gone. (I don't think you ever met him, Dawn, but I doubt you'd like him. He's a bit dismal. Frankly, his personality is bland.) Anyhow, I digress—I handed over control of Team Galactic to Saturn and Mars, but with the grunts dead and the organization stamped with such a bad name in the media, how would they find new recruits? Team Galactic is finished—and so are our plans. Any attempts to reconcile the group will be futile. There is no more room for us anymore, and it's all because of that damn boy. I thank him. Without his resistance, I would still be stuck in that same compromised position to this day, chasing stars that will never let me catch them._

_Jupiter sends her regards; she, too, chose to leave Team Galactic when I found her. She's hiding out with family in Snowpoint—I'm sure she'd be delighted to see you if you went to visit her in secret. She misses you very much. You've made as much of an impact on her as you did me._

_Are you still with the boy? I'm glad that you went with him over me. Standing beside him is your foremost chance at happiness and safety. I'm a felon, and he is a responsible citizen of Sinnoh—you made the right decision. He had an attitude, but he loves you with his whole heart. That love is hard to come by, Dawn, and I hope you cherish your time with him before it grows too short. From experience, I can say that I've lost too many potential friends and demolished family ties because of my reticence and my disgusting ability to take everything for granted. You were the first person that I'd ever met that made me think twice before offhandedly dismissing you as just another pointless outlet, another emotional human being that aimed to put a stop to my dreams._

_Oh, Dawn, what can I say? You've utterly changed me. I've spent two decades—wasted twenty precious years—on farfetched ambitions that had constantly tumbled into pitfalls of bad luck and stupidity. I considered myself pragmatic, but the way I was thinking was not logical. To awaken Diagla, Palika, and wreak havoc upon this foolish planet—that was all I wanted, what I needed. And then you came into my life, and you utterly converted my views to that of normalcy. I'd locked my feelings away in a chest of encumbrance, bound with chains that weighed me down, and you released them with your own might. I should hate you, but I absolutely cannot, and nor can I pursue what I once believed was the solution to ending irrational humanity. How can I destroy this earth when you live on it? It isn't possible. I can smile and laugh and see the world in your colors. And what a beautiful world it is! Thank you, Dawn, thank you so much. I no longer yearn to crush this reality. Instead, I wish for it to flourish._

_I hope I never see you again, Dawn, and I say that because I love you. I am finally away from your being, extracted from the short time that I did try to taint it. Go free, my bird—fly with the wings that I failed to clip. Release yourself from me, as you helped me transcend my own shortcomings. If I ever do meet you once more someday, I will look the other way, for you do not deserve my presence. Let the boy love you with the means that I cannot—I am still learning with this emotion that I've not known for years, but the education is one that I've craved more than anything else._

_Please do not remember me as the man that I was in the very beginning. The way I violated you, pulled your hair, tore your clothes—that man was a monster, and I despise his former subsistence with every piece of me. I want to depart from you with the few positive memories that I do share with you. I still have a scar on my chin from the poison ivy, and that is one that I will never let fade._

_I miss you every day, but I cannot let that obstruct my path. You have liberated me, Dawn, in a way that I thought no one ever could. I am not as you knew, but a stranger to you now. But I am a stranger that will be devoted to you forever, no matter the trials he faces or being inundated with the fact that he'll not touch you once more. You have awakened me to a horizon of possibilities that the dead Cyrus would have never valued._

_I still appreciate your beauty._

_May I meet you in my dreams._

_Cyrus_

()()()

The rain in Pastoria City fell heavier than it did anywhere else in Sinnoh, and Huey could barely manage the rubber coat that he had draped over his head, as his girth was too fat to wrap this discarded child's jacket about him that he'd found on the ground. He was sure that he looked like a homeless thief or a pedophile, loitering beneath a streetlamp beside a collapsing pay phone that he didn't know still existed. Though his beard was trimmed and his hair cut, Huey was by no terms a new man. He continued to be the rotund, ugly loser that he was in prison, and the occasional passing pedestrian slid him glances that expressed that.

Right now, though, he didn't care what any of them thought—he was currently concentrating on the phone that was amazingly functional, its dial tone roaring in Huey's left ear as he held the receiver in one hand and deposited coins one by one. He'd made some disposable pocket change singing on the street corner earlier today, which constituted as a job, seeing as no one in Pastoria would hire him, even for measly cleaning work. For days, he'd been saving to make one phone call—and it was a call that he needed to palliate the demons inside him that Diamonds had only begun to silence.

Once he'd inserted enough money, Huey began to dial. He knew the number by heart, and he hoped that this old thing would hold up so he could go through. Sure enough, the line started to ring, and a woman's voice picked up after three chimes. Huey recognized the long-standing intonation straightaway, yet he hadn't heard it in years. It had only been a few since he lost _her_, but he'd not overlooked time elapsed.

"Hello?" He asked shyly. "Yes, good evening. Did I disturb anything?" He paused to listen to the bickering on the other end of the phone as the woman registered his identity. "Yes, this is Huey. Please listen to me for just a moment. I have to tell you something." Both ends were quiet as the mother reflected upon his request. Finally, after an eternity, she barked an order for him to hurry up, as her time was precious.

"I won't keep you long," Huey promised. "I just wanted to say that I loved her."

Silence. The woman was speechless.

"And I'm sorry."

()()()

THE END


	29. Jupiter Extra

**Hey lovely stragglers! I wrote this as an afterthought to the story. I received very good fan reception on Jupiter, and noticed that her feelings were never really delved into on a personal level. I figured this might be effective in doing so. **

**Sorry about my slow updating. School has been very busy lately, and I haven't had much time to sit down and write Starting the Fire (or really anything). I apologize for this. After marching season, I hope to be back on track.  
**

**Don't forget to drop a review or a favorite! I appreciate it very much!  
**

**-Silent-Protagonist  
**

()()()

I believed there would be an end to this at some point, but I didn't think it would come this quickly. Everything is wrong in this place—corrupt, lurking in the shadows, waiting to strike an unsuspecting victim with its sinful guise. After all, this is a sinister organization, so it is only fitting that sinister secrets follow the leaders of genocide and their willing participants. We are all fools here—if I blamed only Cyrus, then I would be blindly at fault. I'd be alluding that I lived without flaw.

But Dawn—she is a fool as well. She is melodramatic, obsequious, and somewhat stupid. She might have been perceptive and the most intelligent young woman I have ever known, but her naivety is clear to everyone around her. Perhaps one isn't so bright to themselves or the consequences of their actions at sixteen, but I feel she is denser than others her age. I haven't seen the boy that led the charge against our Team Galactic two months ago, but I knew that he was more aware of his circumstances. However, if he had been in this girl's same position, he would have faltered long ago. His romance for her clouds his judgment, and turns him into a docile beast. While he was restrained in the arms of our grunts, thrashing and pushing against their arms, his eyes—brimming with fear and love so powerful that it would be the downfall of any man—never left her.

Now Cyrus's own gaze is captivated by her. If this had happened earlier, I would have been confused as to their infatuation with this clumsy, curious girl. She is imperfect in ways that cannot be defined, and yet her charm is potent to everyone. I understand this, because I am under her spell as well.

I sit by her bed on occasion, deep within the night when no one else is awake. Something makes me want to reach out to her, even in the throes of a restless sleep—even when I should be alone, swallowed by the suffocating atmosphere in my oppressive home. I cannot help myself when I need her. It rouses me, makes me dress myself and stumble to her room, an unwelcome voyuer that she has never known about. During the day, I am her caretaker—I keep her clean, brush her hair, bring her meals and wash her clothes. She is not allowed to do any of those things herself, as Cyrus treats her as if she is a delicate, helpless flower. Why does he worry? She might be clueless, but she is strong. If his own abuse cannot weaken her, then surely she can go to the bathroom on her own. Surely she can do her own hair. Surely she can be without me as her crutch.

Yet I hope she never does.

At night, I know I should not be present. The night should be hers to take stock and calm down, struggle against the invisible chains bound by a lonely man's love. When she is asleep, I do not have to read her expression or understand how she is feeling. I—no, we—can be by ourselves, but I can't stay away. She never hears the door to her room opening as she skirts from dream to dream, her selective hearing tuning out any noise or intruder that might enter. I can come and go as I please, watching her as her small chest rises and falls with every ragged, disturbed breath. I tell myself that I am merely checking on her, but even that lie cannot convince me.

I am a puppet. She is no better.

I've heard her say his name. Not the boy's—his. Cyrus. If I reach out to touch her limp dark locks, she speaks. "Cyrus," she murmurs. "Cyrus," as if I am him. I do not know why she does, and it makes me wonder if he's come to see her at these late hours in the past. Their relationship may be one of master and slave on the surface, but what truly goes on when Cyrus has her trapped in his office at odd hours of the day? Do they fight, or do they hold hands? Do they glare or stare with confused love at each other? I recall when the girl stumbled out, bleeding and incoherent, violated by a man she hated in a storm of torn clothing and desperate weeping. I held her in the showers, waiting as her sobs dissipated and her body slumped, exhaustion taking the place of her distress.

But these days, it is different. Does he still rape her?

Or do they make love?

Those are questions far too intimate for me to ask. It is not my business—Cyrus is my leader, and Dawn is my job. No, she is not my "job"—Dawn has progressed from that point long ago. She is a part of me now, and I will not deny the influence she has over me. As far as prisoners go, she is not mine. I do not hesitate to hold her, touch her, comfort her. What I feel for this girl is not lust. I am the mother of this shattered child, this teenager that is unable to walk her own path. While she is chastised, I stand by and wait, for I can do nothing. I nurse her bruises and wipe away her tears. I am her rock, as she was to me. Dawn gives me a sense of place and belonging—she needs me, and that bond goes deeper than one I have ever known before.

Yet when she says his soulless name in her sleep, I know that I am not the most important person anymore. Perhaps I never have been. Cyrus is just as broken as the rest of us, but perhaps he realizes that now. Perhaps he knows that Dawn is what he needs. She can heal him, and after so long, he finally admits this.

I am glad.

I am proud, as a mother should be.

_I will always be here for you._


End file.
